From the 63rd floor of Bishopsgate Tower, the whole city lies beneath us. The streets are empty. I press closer to the glass, staring through the shifting clouds. We’ve been standing at the high windows all morning, silent, watching Westminster. Three Chinook helicopters hang low and slow over Parliament, circling in wide arcs. Like patient carrion birds.
Rolling news loops the same three stories. A drugs bust on body-cam, Alan Titchmarsh’s obituary, a new American bakery in Islington. In-between, adverts for hair transplants and easy credit. Outside, a heavy tactical drone hurtles past, rattling the glass. It banks sharply towards the caved-in dome of St Paul’s. Londoners call it the boiled egg.
A piercing analogue tone comes from the kitchen TV.
“This is BBC Television from London. We interrupt normal programming for an announcement by the Prime Minister.”
The picture cuts to the Prime Minister. His permanent smirk gives nothing away, but it looks like he’s underground. The office gathers round the screen.
“Citizens of Great London, our city is dying. The cancers of crime, poverty, and acts of terror are killing our Great state from within. This morning, the Hammersmith and Chelsea bridges were destroyed by southern terrorists.”
He leans towards the camera, resting his elbows on the podium.
“Effective immediately, the Northern districts declare unilateral independence from Great London. Our new state will be founded upon the ideals of aspiration, order, and strength. We offer our citizens the right to struggle, to fight, to strive. In return, we offer you stability.”
The office is silent other than the hum of air conditioning. The Prime Minister pauses and looks down the camera with quiet authority.
“Citizens have 24 hours to decide; North or South. All bridges will close at 11:59hrs tomorrow.”
The screen cuts to a new crest. Greater London.
“Fucking terrorists. Slum vermin!” Shouts Mr Andrews, Head of Finance.
“Randolph is a Trafalgarist, Tom. He would say that.” Says a tall man from Corporate.
There’s a muted rush behind me. Colleagues in dark suits and blouses grab what they can and bolt for the lifts, leaving open browsers and warm coffees behind. The man from Corporate sits down at his desk and starts replying to an email.
“I said this would happen,” says Maya, looking at me with interest.
“24 hours?…” I mumble.
“It’s time to decide. Finally! Do ya wanna be N1 or S-LUM?”
I look at the old city. At the new border. The dirty river that, by the time the tide turns, will be a moat.
“My mum,” I say softly, “Casper. I can’t leave them.”
“Of course you can.”
“But this job, Maya… it’s all I have. It’s all they have. All that keeps them safe, down in Brockley. Maybe I could still send them money?”
“I doubt it.”
“I can’t abandon them. But… what about Nye?”
I think of last spring. The day Mum met Nye in Regent’s Park. Casper held her hand.
“Her family are up in Tottenham, aren’t they? Why would she go south.”
The thought hits me. I won’t see her before I leave.
If I leave.
I nod, uncertain. “South….”
“See ya, then.” Says Maya, still staring at me.
Tiny dark figures are massing along the South Bank. The skyline is dotted with drones and helicopters, red and blue lights blinking through the murk. The streets are now swarming with bodies. There’s a tank on London Bridge.
I sit down and stand up again, “Maya — seriously — what the fuck are you going to do?!”
Maya doesn’t move but her eyes are alive.
“You know, Kit. I’m more interested in what you’re gonna do.”
“But you’re from the south too!”
Maya pauses, shakes her head. Her brow softens briefly, then hardens again.
“I’ve got nothing left down south. And neither will you if you go back. It's not about the past anymore. It's about the future.”
Our colleagues are sprinting to the lifts. Some are just standing and staring. Shouts echo from the atrium. As we turn round, Raul, the mild-mannered cleaner punches a woman from Accounts to the floor. She’s trying to push into a lift that won’t move. It’s too full.
The fire alarm blares.
“Attention! Attention! Please leave the building immediately!”
Raul and a day trader are throwing people out of the lift. It still won’t move. Then, with the doors wide open, the lift drops like a stone. Their screams are lost in a second.
Hello William, My name is Adam Burgess. I am attempting to post my story in the comments for the competition. It is there now entitled 'BREAK' I am reaching out to you in desperation as it keeps vanihsing from the comments. Would you mind if I post it instead in the 'reply' to your own story? I can't be confident that it will stay on the page at the moment and I fear it will be lost. Please reply if you get this. I think substack has gone haywire.. If I don't hear from you I will probably post it in your 'reply' section with an explanation.. for which I hope you can forgive me. Thank you. Adam
JWB...Aha!! Thank you! I did not know this.. Now I have to go back and delete about a million copies of my same blimmin story, and lots of desperate messages to Hanif!! Thank you I will do so at once..
She lies on the small sofa in the living room, which is also a kitchen. It is a long narrow space, above a jewellery shop on the high street, in the flat where he lives alone. The street has a historic feel, as though its best days are behind it. But still, it smells of money.
She is young, only 17, and she is naked, and the man is sitting in a chair looking at her, his eyes roving up and down her body. He is smiling a smile she is becoming used to, eyes narrowed, with intent. Large breasts, small waist, a flat stomach that will disappear with age. Sturdy legs that are nothing like Kate’s or Naomi’s. She is old enough to know about the pencil test, but she has never had sex, except with her pillow, quietly at night, hoping that her mother won’t come in. Later, years later, she will think of him and the word lascivious will come to mind, alongside another word favoured by tabloid newspapers even as they print sexual pictures of teenage girls. But right now she feels powerful, desired. More like Rose, asking Jack to “paint me like one of your French girls”.
This flat is the same flat where her parents lived as a newly married couple in the 1960s. They had spent a year in Italy, where William was working in the oil industry and Pamela had joined him, fresh from nursing school. In the daytime, when William was at work, men would chase Pamela – all long legs, miniskirts and a short, straight wig – calling “nigra, nigra”. Back in London, they avoided moving too near the house in Bounds Green where his mother and sister lived, with its red concertina vinyl door separating the kitchen from the dining room. Instead, they rented here, in this small flat with large windows.
The girl takes this as a sign. She is young enough to believe in fate. The fact that this man – who made a beeline through her group of teenage schoolfriends at The World’s End in Camden – lives in the same flat where her parents lived holds a certain power. 'Surely this is meant to be?' she thinks, and she really believes it. She does not consider how well it worked out for William and Pamela.
What she does not yet realise is that the meeting at The World’s End was more a plan than a sign. The man had been watching her for some time – the Saturdays she came into the shop downstairs with her mother, to pick out a pair of lapis lazuli silver drop earrings, one small triangle above a larger one. The shop, where he works a few days a week, is owned by his mother. Her second husband is from Morocco, which is where they source their jewellery. His own father is in a residential home in Muswell Hill. In the months to come, they will go and see him, and she will ask him,
"Do you read much?"
And he will answer, unsmiling,
"Why are you asking me that?"
And she will feel young, and foolish.
Today, the man and the girl do not have sex, but it won’t be many months before he makes clear that he will move on if she won’t – "It’s what girlfriends and boyfriends do" – and she will feel she has to, even though she is not ready. It will be painful, and there will be blood, and afterwards, as he walks her home down the big hill, they will meet her mother driving up it in her white Nissan Micra, determined to save her daughter from the thing that has already happened. It will be November the fifth, Guy Fawke’s Night, and, after she kisses him goodbye she will persuade herself, again, that this too is fate, because it is her parents’ wedding anniversary.
The girl is lying on the sofa because the man asked her to. She has never had a boyfriend before, not a proper one. He knows he only has limited time – she leaves for university in a year – and he will make the most of it. When, on a Saturday night 30 years later, in a new city, she opens the door, and sees him standing there, holding the Indian takeaway she has ordered for her husband and children, this is the thing that goes through her mind. Her, lying naked on a sofa, and him watching.
I had racked up seven empties; the eighth was going down as readily as the first. She came and went, occasionally asking the right questions at the wrong time. Making light. Being supportive, she thought.
The pointed reality of the accident had been blunted a little, but still too raw, like the wounds on that man’s legs as he staggered, almost drunk from his injuries, towards me.
____________
It had been barely 15 minutes. I had locked the doors, hunkered in the car. To achieve what, I wasn’t really sure.
How the hell had I been able to drive away? I’d watched through the rear-view mirror as his car performed its stunt, a triple axel through time and space that were somehow slack and dreamy, undulating bubbles. The confused faces of my children in my peripheral vision distracted me; the SUV touched down, roof first, bouncing once, then twice, off the rough tarmac, before rocking silently to a halt more than 50 yards behind.
‘Dead’, I thought. ‘He must be dead. What the fuck just happened?’
We were unscathed; the children, unaware. Maybe as much to protect them as to pretend this hadn’t happened, I drove around the corner and pulled over to drop my daughter at her art class, ready to sidle casually out of this horror.
____________
In recollections now, every detail is uncanny: the balletic flip of the car, the monstrousness of a man contorted and shredded, bloodied, spewing superhuman rage as he hammers his fists down on the bonnet of my car. The fresh-out-of-the-woodwork swarm of witnesses shouting from all sides, expecting what? For me to step out of my car willingly into this hot mass of hostility? The police - the fucking police - adjudicating through the owner of the wrecked car, a bilingual resident and me, what has transmuted into a dispute about the cost of repairs (‘a fucking write-off’, I think), rather than rushing to get medical help for the injured Hulk who is being restrained like a dog before a fight.
But I would have been them. If I wasn’t me. I’d have been baying for the blood of the man who, indifferent, drove away from someone he believed to be dead, from something for which he was partly responsible.
____________
Seven years on, the flashbacks are less frequent. Perhaps - I suspect more than likely - I would have left her anyway, even if that accident hadn’t sent a fevered fracture through our complacency. As it was, it was no more than three months before I told her. At the time, I didn’t connect the two events, couldn’t grasp that such a cataclysm could shatter the ossified contours of a failing, decades-long relationship.
For some, trauma begets trauma. For me? Well, for me, that’s only part of the story. Trauma begot an act of wilful and necessary self-harm, a brutal dismantling of family, of life as I had known it.
And what of forgiveness? What of absolution? They’re the least real part of all of this. For all the visceral certainty of what happened then and since, these things evade, tantalise and repulse me, lost somewhere between the start of that fateful day and the wreckage it became.
My best friend’s mother froze herself to death, walked into the cornfield behind their country house in her bathrobe in a snowstorm. They found her in the morning, the cold brittling her bones to the breaking point. My friend, let’s call her G., said it was not such a shock as you might think. Her mother had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for decades. Discharged from her latest institution, G.’s mom and dad had gone to their vacation home in northern Michigan. Winds blowing, her father did not hear G.’s mother leave the house, would not look for her until way into the next day. When G. got a call at her job in Boston, 700 miles away, saying her mother had wandered off in her slippers in sub-zero temps, she felt responsible. But all this happened long before I met her, which was in the 1980’s at a film festival, in a barn in New Mexico. We clicked. I had a Trotsky-ite mom, she had a Communist dad. We both wanted to talk about dinner parties for hours after we left them. Even when she wasn’t sure of her own life, she was a cheerleader for mine. G. wasn’t perfect, she had prejudices – French women are always well-dressed, Toronto bagels were superior. And when she wanted to compliment someone, she would say, “he was normal.” To me, normal meant boring, but for G. it was high praise – it meant your mom braided your hair, small-town band concerts and grassroots democracy. Which I guess made sense for someone whose mother had offed herself. G. was also incredibly positive about life, always nurturing somebody, holding out hope broken things could be made whole. This might be because ever since G. was ten years old, her dad, with no functioning wife, and working all hours to support his family, had put her in charge of looking after her two younger brothers. She raised them well, they both finished school, got married, had children. But in addition to her mother’s being crazy, G. had incredible bad luck. With her first cancer, back in the 2000’s, we refused to believe it would kill her. She would beat this - we were not yet done talking. One day, during her chemo, when I thought we had shared just about everything, she told me something from when she was fifteen years old. Every day after school she had been practicing to be first chair on violin in the All-City orchestra. One day she came home from school and opening its case, there was her violin, smashed to pieces. Maple body in splinters, strings dangling off its broken neck. Her first thought was her mother had been released from her latest care facility, but she had not. Only her brothers were home. Each blamed the other. G. was sure it couldn’t be the older one who had grown to be a help to her, was certain it was the youngest, already showing signs of their mother’s unpredictability. Her father took no side, replacing the instrument with a cheap school rental. In time, G. gave up the violin, graduated high school early and got a good job in New York, returning only for Christmas. She helped her brothers when needed but agonized over which was capable of such violent smashing, would never escape the fear she was walking on unsteady ground, always prepared for a family knife in her back. G. never got married, never had children. In time, with much hard therapy, she became a brilliant teacher, mentor, helper. Her bad luck with cancer eventually killed her. Me, I feel guilty appropriating her story here, but because her voice is gone, I need to scream for her, against the cracks made from early bangs and stomps, to cry for the unbound wounds that split so much and marvel at the miraculous drive to repair that remained in my good, best friend.
I grew up living a lie. My whole family did. We were big, noisy and visible - mum, dad, four children close in age. So the lie was necessary in order to exist in community with each other, and in the community at large. When you have four young children you need support and you need to fit in. And when you have six beating hearts feeding six pulsing brains all pushing and pulling and growing and forcing and resisting within the four walls of your red brick house, you need some kind of lie to keep it all together, or at least a simplification. Our lie kept us stitched tight - that we were one, that we were the same – as each other and as everyone else. We were not.
Kin – the word means your closest family or relations. In Japanese the word kin means gold, and there’s another word that’s often joined with it - tsugi meaning repair. So Kintsugi is this beautiful art of repairing fractured pottery with gold, which many think makes it more beautiful, making a celebratory feature of an accident, a breakdown, a fracture but simultaneously celebrating its repair. I like this and don’t like it. It’s far too often wheeled out as a metaphor now, with the overall meaning trite – broken things can and should be repaired, and they’ll be stronger, more beautiful because of their fractures, but the emphasis is still on the fix! In real life not everything can or should be put back together.
Even with their apparent dedication to child-making and rearing, my family fractured when my mum realised she was attracted to women, not men. Well that was the main reason for the break, the outward story, but there was more to it than that. Perhaps mum was tired of trying to hold onto four fighting cats in a bag. We were growing up and she and dad were growing apart. And mum, well, where was she in all of this. Her identity was an outline, a container for us only. I would struggle to describe her to you then. I can now. Looking back neither she nor dad would change the outcome. Both settled with new partners they love, both living their purpose and expressing their identities far more freely. We’re all grown up with our own lives and families anyway. Nothing stays the same.
It happened to me too, and my partner. Both of us had children with people we’re no longer with, and then we got together and joined the families up. So now, as second generation family blenders our family is GIGANTIC and complex and beautiful, and distressing and difficult and tense and fractured, and repairing and tearing. All at the same time sometimes. It’s exhausting and exhilarating and life-affirming and sometimes it feels too challenging and complicated for words! A metaphor, I like to think, for society as a whole. Nothing’s perfect, nothing’s for ever, but things do and need to break, and when they do, repair is only one of the many good options.
I’m breaking apart right now, as I write this and I feel the pain of that every day. I feel it in my aching joints and muscles as I drag my creaky middle-aged body out of bed in the morning, I feel it in my mind as I forge a new career path that is more rooted in my creativity and talent than I’ve ever felt able or allowed to own up to (and own) before, and I feel it in this frightened little sick feeling in my guts as I shift my identity from the outward me people know and expect to a new me that’s raw and vulnerable, having thrown off the ill-fitting clothing of other people’s expectations and not found any new ones yet. But I have my kintsugi marks. This song lyric says it for me: ‘Look at these lines on my face, each and every one a testament to all the mistakes I had to make to find courage.” Whatever else breaks, I know I’ll always have that.
My partner makes mosaics - making something entirely new out of disparate parts. Charity shop pottery once central to a family dinner table, turfed out and sold on after a house clearance. Beloved dinner sets lost to carelessness and the cracks that develop over time through use and dishwasher detergent. Wear and tear. Tear and repair. Rinse and repeat.
The man who lives with me here made me aware of the light three nights ago. Since then, we have been waiting for it to appear again from out there in the vast sea. From what I understand, we both arrived in this place at the same time. Time, admittedly, has become quite a slippery notion for us, but I believe it was around two weeks ago.
Though I have no memory of where I was before, I do know that where I am now is not home. We live in a forest, which sits next to the sea. The water is deep blue throughout the day and the waves are ceaseless. Each evening, a burning sun descends and plunges us into darkness. All that can then be heard is our voices and the waves gently expiring on the shore.
My companion and I do not share a language. For the first days after I awoke here, I had no company, saw no other human and believed myself to be alone. I was much relieved, therefore, when I encountered him on the third night. We almost stumbled straight into each other as we were slashing our way through the dense foliage in search of food. In appearance, we looked incredibly similar – mid 40’s, thinning brown hair, slightly slouched. We could have been brothers.
I spoke first. “Thank God, I thought I was alone!”
He stared back at me, a large stick held in his hand.
“Are you alone” I continued, “or are there others?”
He lowered his stick, and out of his mouth came a sound unlike anything I had ever heard. This was not English, nor seemingly any known language. The noises he emitted came in a broken and labouring cadence that spilled out in rogue syllables. Impossible glottal shards punctuated randomly, and all through his babble he wore a wide-eyed look of panic. Alarmed, I turned to flee, but he thrust a hand onto my shoulder and stopped me. We stood there long enough to feel somewhat safe.
It was clear that we could not communicate in the usual manner. No matter what he said, what formations of sound came from him, it was impossible for me to parse any meaning from these utterances. He too would become frustrated at times with my talk, which must have sounded to him like the murmurings of Babel. Fortunately, we pursue the same goals – eating the mushrooms and wiggling grubs from the forest floor, building fires each evening, searching for other signs of life.
Needless to say, I was shocked when I discovered that he had begun to pick up certain stray pieces of my language. Occasionally, I will catch him muttering something that I can recognise from my own voice. For example, on one occasion, after a long day of foraging in the forest, I decided to head back to my camp.
“Home-time”, I joked. He squinted and tilted his head.
“Home” I said, “home”, and tapped my chest. I threw my hand out to the horizon, past the sea. “Home!”
He nodded and we separated. Later, as we lay at our fires, I heard sobbing. He saw me watching him.
“Home. Sick.” he said, and in the firelight, I saw tears.
Three nights ago, we were making shelter for the night. I was exhausted from the day and eager to sleep. As I was finishing my bed of leaves, I heard some yelp of alarm behind me. I assumed he had burnt himself lighting a fire and paid no notice. Moments later, I felt him tapping my back, needing a lend of firewood I imagined. I ignored him still.
He grabbed at me and I shook him off. When he slapped at me, I turned upon him with some rage.
“What? What is it now, fool?” I yelled.
“Look” he said, grabbing my shoulders. He spun me around. “Fool!”
He pointed a thin finger out to the sea. I saw nothing more than the endless blue. Then, sudden and clear, it appeared, the light bopping upon the water. Bright, globular, it seemed to hover, five seconds, ten seconds, then was extinguished.
We were silent. We could not find the words. Turning to him, I saw a smile spread across his face.
I will try to be kinder to my friend. After all, he is all I have in this place, other than the grubs and the silence. I’ll sit next to him tonight, and we’ll watch the darkening sea for a glimpse of that elusive light.
My right hand is being pulled into an infinite void. A moment before, I was walking in winter sunshine, large dog on each side, Henry the red-brown Irish setter on my left, Darcy the shaggy white-and-grey Old English Sheepdog on my right.
I orient myself. There is no hole in the road. Just an unseen patch of ice that has caught me off balance.
Something strange and worrying has happened to my arm. I lift it with my other arm. It is still attached to my shoulder. But it feels precarious.
A & E and it’s Christmas Day. A cheery young woman doctor prepares me to inhale gas and air so she can reset my dislocated shoulder. But then sees the Xray. My shoulder is broken. It is a ‘fragility’ fracture. A major one.
The fracture is in my bone but also in my life. Now, approaching the end of my seventh decade, I am not only old. I am officially FRAGILE.
It is Covid time. I pass a Covid test and can be admitted for surgery to fix my jagged fracture. I wait starving for a long day until there is a place for me in an operating theatre. The junior doctor cannot raise a vein for the canula that needs to be in place for the drugs to go in to sedate me. My veins must be fragile too. The consultant anaesthetist does better. I know nothing until I wake as I am being wheeled in my bed through the women’s surgical ward. Lights are subdued, so I know it is night time.
There are three other women in the beds close by. None of them are sleeping peacefully. Across the room the woman who I will hear addressed as Peggy, is tearing off her bandages and calling pitifully for an absent Joan to help her. To her right is Mrs R, who cannot breathe. A nurse urges her to sit up and try to breathe without her oxygen mask. So she can go home. Mrs R does not respond. Some years ago I worked with dying people. I know in my fragile bones that Mrs R does not want to go home. Or anywhere else. She wants to die.
To my left is a woman who remains nameless to me. She must be turned regularly through the night. Through the curtains that hide but do not even muffle the sound, I can hear her deep, inhuman groans as she involuntarily protests at the pain.
Due to the drugs I have been given to pre-empt post operative pain, and this alien context, I do not sleep. I drink sweetened weak coffee brought to my bed by Antonio, the kind Italian healthcare assistant. Intermittently he comes to talk to me. He tells me he is bullied at work because of his accent.
At 7.30 my surgeon declares me fit to leave. But I am told that I must stay and see the physiotherapist. Then I must stay until the end of the morning ward round. Then I must wait until the junior doctor has written my discharge letter. I have no agency. I have become a fragile old lady who must do what she is told.
I am grateful for my care but I feel trapped and fearful. Fearful of my body and its newly revealed fragility. Frightened about my dependence on others. Fearful of the future that awaits me, the fear that before long I will become Peggy, Mrs R or the woman without a name.
As the months and years advance, I dance between acceptance and resistance of my own fragility and age continues. Despite ongoing treatment I break metatarsals and at intervals spend weeks hobbling clumsily in surgical boots. My body succumbs to mysterious processes of inflammation and infection. I have to acknowledge my increasing dependence on medications and the thankfully abundant kindness of nurses and doctors.
I make adjustments. I let my hair go white. I walk instead of running. I take on new work that fulfils me and I campaign on issues that seem important to me. I try to take myself less seriously and others more so. I try to focus on the now and leave the future to those who will be here to see it.
With love in my heart I remember how Henry the red-brown and Darcy the white-and-grey dog, waited patiently beside me when I fell and fractured. They are dust and ashes now.
A dog stands in the street gazing thoughtfully up at the window. At the window is a woman. She is naked and crying. Behind her a man appears. He angrily closes the curtain. The dog turns and casually walks down the empty street, the sun setting. Today was a good day for some and terrible for others. For the happy it flowed, their hearts sang with sensations of connection and comfort. For the unhappy it grated hard, nauseating and painful to the chest. So far apart. The space between gets filled with sewage and broken bones. This is where the dogs hang out. Nuzzling, fighting and biting each other's tails late into the night.
The sun comes up and the birds are loud. A chorus so penetrating the skin tingles and the blood livens. Some sleep, some leap out of bed and kiss their pretty little pooch. In their kitchen their eggs taste good and fill their stomach. Others are trying to sleep in, the howling of the dogs kept them up all night. They bury deeper into the pillow, seeking an abyss that can’t be reached.
The radio is on, the laptop is on and the TV is on. is busy. Information engorged and thrown away like an old tea towel. The footballer reaches for his gold watch and checks his instagram while the nurse takes a breath that hurts her stomach. The priest is masterbating furiously as he thinks his unspeakable thoughts. He simply mustn’t act on them. The actor sleeps and dreams of being fucked hard by that director.
The dogs are barking loudly now as the people pass them on their way to the station. The train is here again today and will be tomorrow. On the same tracks day after day. The nurse wonders if the train ever feels like leaping from the rails. Flying up the high street shouting “stand clear of the doors!” A ridiculous thought she thinks while simultaneously picturing her splintered bones on the tracks being knawed by the dogs.
The policeman is angry. No one is listening and his wife doesn’t speak anymore. She stands naked at the window again. He pulls on the curtain angrily. This is their ritual but this time the thick material tears. A tear rolls down over his big cheek and his mouth quivers. The marmite on toast, his favourite thing, can’t help him. The city is now full of dogs and he was always a cat person. He places his helmet carefully on his head. It always makes him feel beautiful. He is beautiful in it. An archetype immediately recognisable. Safety if you’re white. Danger if you’re black. A broken femur.
The solicitor is black and runs a law firm, he’s always moving just ahead of the crest of that wave, jumping and moving. He drives the latest BMW. The car his dad always dreamed of having. Stopped and searched again. Again. He’s angry this time, resistant. They kick him so hard his leg breaks
The dogs are there looking at him. They don’t judge, they just look. Their fur is dirty but their eyes are clear and blue and green and brown. Their fur is grey and black and brown. They stand their quiet. He smiles at them.
Today will be the best day in someone’s life and the worst in another’s. A virgin boy will get laid, a young girl will be raped. The sun is cold today, deceptively bright. The middle aged man is unemployed, lost and busy doing little. He has a laptop and on-line meditations. He’s applying for jobs he doesn’t want and he won’t get. His son comes in and beams that cheeky smile. The one that breaks his heart into tiny pieces.
An old person will die in pain and alone, another surrounded by weeping loved ones. The old know everything and their bones wear the weight. She smiles at him even though he can’t remember who she is. He makes no sense and she holds his hand a bit tighter. His hand is so thin the skin falls away from the visible bone. Death in his lifetime, his living present and the quietness is beauty. It’s hard to find though. The TV is still on, and the radio and there’s wifi the smell of urine is strong the first time you visit. He’s trying to tell her something, she gets frustrated and snaps. She feels terrible. Today she’s one of the people feeling broken. Their dog puts his soft head on the old man’s lap, the place where he broke his hip. The dog can feel the old man’s cold hard bone under his warm, wet snout.
Light filters in, eyes struggle to open, she hangs on to the dream a little longer. There was something happy there. Quiet in the house. Still dark outside. Selfishly, she takes in the silence and longs to make it last. If she could disappear there into the stillness. What she remembers of last night’s book still reverberating inside her, this deep desire for the world in all its wild reality, how close she feels to the heart of it all, accessed here in this stillness. Strong agony for a deep dive into joy before thoughts and responsibilities invade. Mother’s cough. She is stirring. It’s time to get up. Why do the muscles ache, why does the body not jump up to match the spirit of the intention the way it used to do. It’s time to stumble fuck over to the room and change the diaper on the person who is now an existential extension of the self she no longer can refer to as herself. There are two selves now and she carries one and keeps one going every day at her own expense, or is it a gift? Checklist of needs for the day, a day that will be invaded by that other person in the room who keeps her prisoner (or sets her free) and she goes willingly while trying to summon that thing the Buddhists call compassion, instead of the grumps. Where is the equilibrium she would possess if she was actually a good person and weren’t complaining all the time about a choice she made, (but did she have a choice)? Sometimes she’s quite good at it and rises to the occasion. Sometimes she wants the jaws of sleep to devour her before her brain starts thinking, reading the news, drinking coffee, more news, email, appointments, the inescapable schedule of events, and the ever present struggle, the nagging questions of where she could have been, instead, or who she might have been, if only the winds of karma had blown differently and there’s a rushed sense of urgency to know, just finally know, what are we doing here, what is the reason we can feel so much inside and yet time pushes us on before we can come to an understanding and all we do is try to capture some small semblance of what it was like to be here. Suddenly, it’s all practicality again, logic and forced labor, but the spirit wants what it wants and she still remembers what it’s like to connect to something other than her telephone or computer screen. Before the world began to crumble, before cruelty became the name of the game, before the world was on fire, and creatures cried out so loudly that their sound was audible even to her human ears. I want to LIVE says spirit. I want to lie in the arms of my beloved. I want to jump up and down, to thrive, I want to be free. I want to scream from the boredom of doing the same exact thing every day for almost a year now. And yet, aren’t you ashamed to think that there are so many who are unluckier than you, in dire straits all over the world and your little life with its huge longings doesn’t register in this overwhelming chaos of untold stories, small stories that feel so big. She remembers there is a man in a wheelchair who writes these incredible newsletters of his thoughts and who cares about art and film and has such a great sense of humor that he laughs at himself and makes her laugh and she knew of his work and had heard his name mentioned before, but it’s only now that he is suffering and still striving that he’s managed to reach her. And he’s so creative even after his body is shattered that he’s writing a film about it! She still wants to take up boxing or just hang a punching bag in the middle of the hall and hit the fuck out of it every day, as she continues to fight for her right to fall into the arms of art and to relish the quiet of the morning before anyone wakes and of the middle of the night when everyone has finally gone to sleep and she knows that IT IS THERE. So near, so real, so close, yet hard to fathom.
During our lunch break, I told Alice about the house next door. Sitting on a decayed bench at the top of the hill next to campus, we stared at the only oak tree standing in a ten mile radius. Piles of shit - literal and figurative - were strewn around its trunk.
‘It’s all been knocked down.’ I said, scratching my chin where I’d cut myself shaving that morning.
‘And the green shed?’
Alice’s eyes were cool, but the drink can in her hand let out a metallic pop as her grip tightened.
‘A pile of shattered planks,’ I sighed.
‘But the fucking pipistrelles...’ She smacked her hand against her jeans and slurped the foam off the rim of the can. ‘Bastards.’
‘Yeah’, I agreed. Alice usually did most of the talking, with me doing the nodding. I had fallen for her during our introductory tour of the campus, when she had pointed at a poster that said ‘Using the Blackboard as Birth Control’.
‘Must hurt,’ Alice had said with a smirk.
It was love at first sarcasm, although purely platonic - I liked dicks too much. Alice was the one who introduced me to all the TikToks about the planet going up in flames, and ideas for our own direct action soon dominated our conversations. In the past week, Alice had settled on smashing the window of the little Tesco at the local petrol station. It wasn’t ideal, since I had a huge crush on the guy who worked there, but I’d kept my mouth shut and had promised to keep an eye out for a suitably hefty projectile.
The house next door being demolished had come with one upside at least: a shit tonne of bricks. I had sneaked one into my bag that same morning to show her. When Alice saw it her face lit up.
‘Fuck it, let’s do it now!’
Maybe it was the outrage for the evicted bats, or the sugar high from her third energy drink, but whatever the trigger, it made her charge down the slope towards the gate, and I followed. When we arrived at our target, Alice pulled the hood of my navy hoodie over my head, and firmly pushed my sweaty back towards the entrance.
‘Go!’ she said, as if it were obvious that since I had sourced the brick I would be the one throwing it.
I stepped off the pavement onto the tarmac of the forecourt, but my legs were reluctant to take me further. Could I really do this? Was there any point? I thought about sitting in my mum’s car, recounting the TikToks I’d watched about microplastic contamination in 99% of all fish, or McDonald’s proposal to start keeping cows in indoor battery sheds in an attempt to contain their planet-warming farts, and my mum responding: ‘Yes dear, very sad,’ before changing the subject to the terrible traffic, and how she was going to miss the beginning of Crufts on Channel 4. I found my empty hand was outstretched. The brick smashed the window.
Except it wasn't the Tesco’s window, but the rear windscreen of a gargantuan black Range Rover that had just pulled in front of me. Frozen in place, my eyes were drawn to a red bumper sticker featuring a crude illustration of Greta Thunberg in striped prison attire, next to the words ‘Lock them up’. I’d barely had time to duck behind the blue Mini next to me when a huge unshaven man wearing a gold chain and a red baseball cap burst out of the 4x4.
‘What the FUCK?! Who’s the cunt who did this?’ he exploded, holding the brick in his giant fist.
My crush came stumbling out of the little Tesco’s front doors looking extremely panicked, which made him look even hotter than I’d remembered.
‘YOU! Show me the fucking footage. CCTV and shit - NOW!’
The angry man’s voice was rising higher and higher in pitch as my poor innocent crush kept repeating this wouldn’t be possible. I looked back over my shoulder and saw that there was an empty plastic carrier bag and a spilled Red Bull can leaking on the grass where Alice had been crouching one minute ago. She’d legged it.
Before I had a chance to feel betrayed, there was a sharp crash followed by the hiss of raining glass.
‘Snivelling little shit!’ the burly man shouted, slamming his car door and starting the engine.
He had just thrown the brick through the little Tesco’s window.
You agree to meet Sam at the art museum, mutual ground, where the two of you hold a dual membership going on over five years. In the second-floor photography gallery (permanent collection, local San Francisco photographers, everything you both like) he stands too close to you, jittery, his body radiating heat, atomically hot when you touch. He looks frail enough that you could break him in half without much power. Thin in his jeans and plaid shirt. Smelling oddly metallic and a little sweaty. You don’t want to be there, listening to him badmouth his other friends, his ex-boss, his niece. When his voice rises in anger, you flush with embarrassment.
Years ago, you’d stayed with him after his Dad died, the two of you drinking your way through half a dozen bottles of vodka and tonic, mostly vodka, until he passed out on his carpet (thick lush white tufted) and you called a cab to take you home.
One night after an unexpected break up, you meet at a wine bar down the street from your house. That night, you were the live wire. He patted your back as you cried at the bar, while the bartender silently pushed a stack of napkins and a bowl of olives to you.
This meeting is so Sam can apologize for his recent outbursts. For hanging up on you, swearing, during a call he’d initiated. For ignoring advice he had specifically asked you for. For threatening suicide in texts only to “lol” them five minutes later. He knows your history – that talk of self-harm isn’t something you take lightly, that it reminds you of a friend who took his life before he’d had a chance to really begin living – and you’d implored Sam countless times to be less flippant about it.
You spent Passover together the previous spring, Sam reclining on your couch as he continued to recover from major back surgery. You balanced dishes on your laps, counting out the ten plagues by spilling wine drop by drop onto a plate.
You’d seen him at his lowest, writhing in a hospital bed in a thin hospital johnny, and an adult diaper. You don’t write this to embarrass him but to attempt an explanation about friendship and love. You and a handful of his remaining friends texting late into the night trying to see who could take him home, who could monitor his meds, who would clean the apartment the next day after he tore it apart looking for the morphine that should never have been prescribed to someone with his level of alcohol and methamphetamine and opiate dependency issues.
You stay at the museum for three hours, drifting from gallery to gallery, the entire time wishing you could leave. When you finally go outside, you suggest a quick coffee across the street but he wants to go back to his place.
You’ve never felt unsafe with Sam but you do now, sliding into an Uber with him, his body still hot, still jumpy, even when sitting down. At his place you notice the dishes piled in the sink. The vodka bottles poking up from his stainless-steel designer recycling bin. The stale smell of an apartment that could use a thorough cleaning. The dead angel fish floating at the top of his on and off boyfriend’s aquarium. Sam is a bundle of energy, movements jerky like a scarecrow.
You can’t stay. You don’t want to sit on his tiny loveseat listening to his stream of consciousness, wondering if there is any food in his fridge for a change, waiting for an apology that would have already been offered if it was going to be given at all.
The last time you see him is when you give him a quick hug at the front door. And you feel shitty and sad and like a bad person, but not sorry.
In the next few months, you get texts you quickly mute. Voicemails you delete. Emails you mark as read. Letters arrive in the mail but you won’t read them – you hand them to Karrie who reads them for you. Same old story.
You won’t engage, can’t engage, even as you know there will be a time when you get a message from one of Sam’s friends, needing you to come help clean out the apartment after he dies. You hope it doesn’t happen for a long, long time.
But when it does, you’ll do this last thing for him.
I was making money, don’t ask how, but enough to rent one room above a garage in west L.A. I had split from Dennis but took his painting of naked ladies as a room divider between my bed and the front door. The walls were lavender and India prints and lace billowed around my bed.
I was hanging out with a guy named Ted, a sound engineer. After I finished a job, I would go to the recording studio and stand around in the back while Ted worked the console. Behind the control board was a thick, glass window. On the other side musicians tuned guitars and techies adjusted gear and foam baffles. Ted sat in darkness; the musicians were lit. “Ready?”
I thought all a girlfriend had to do was be cute and quiet. Presence was enough. I didn’t have to talk. In fact, in Ted’s control room, you couldn’t talk. But the scene outside the studio; in the hallways and stairways, was a crush of agents, musicians, and groupies, hustling to score.
Ted was cold and quirky and British. There was something about him that was faintly repellant, and his respect for me wouldn’t have budged a needle on his console. I thought he thought I was a bit of hippy trash. He had no measure of me; my inner life was sealed off, even to myself. I had long, sun-streaked hair, black eye liner, a mini dress and bare feet. I was an easy laugh, I liked the intoxicants, I liked to party. I was a good enough girlfriend for the short term, he was a good enough boyfriend.
Until I met Geoff in the hallway. He was the bassist in the famous band that was recording in Ted’s studio. Our eyes kept finding one another and finally I moved close and asked him if he wanted to fuck. We left in a car full of bandmates and at Genesee Avenue just the two of us got out and climbed my wooden staircase to the billowing India prints.
I had another thing going on with a red headed biker from Texarkana. I kid you not. Can’t remember his name, it was a nickname, a biker nickname. He would show up from time to time, clomping up the wooden stairs and we’d get high and physical. I felt sorry for him. Why? I have no idea.
I was bored. Terribly, terribly bored. And numb. And dumb. And lonely, terribly, terribly lonely.
In my perpetual daze of numbness, some synapses connected; better get some birth control pills. I was also smitten by a married second cameraman and though things weren’t going well, the situation suggested that I should take the pill even if it did make my hair fall out.
The health care available was the LA Free Clinic. I wandered over there one summer evening and was given a cup to pee in. After an hour I was ushered into a treatment room by a Hollywood handsome doctor. He asked me why I was there, and I said to get birth control.
He said, “You’re too late for that. You’re pregnant.”
The shock left me in shock.
Some friends invited me over to watch the moon landing that night. It held no drama for me. A little astronaut had just landed in my uterus. I told them I was pregnant. They wanted to pay my way across the border to Mexico for an abortion. No, I couldn’t do that. I believed that if I went to Mexico, I wouldn’t come home alive.
Back in my apartment I listened to Joni Mitchell and daydreamed about a baby who would love me forever, who would become my best friend and my companion for life. I wouldn’t be alone, and I’d have a purpose.
So, I stayed pregnant, moved back to Chicago, went on welfare, and had the baby.
She was born early with hydrocephalus. She survived, and the plates of her skull eventually fused. In her early twenties she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a not uncommon outcome of hydrocephalus.
I named her Bronagh; Gaelic for tears.
Who was the father? We will never know.
She changed her name to Deborah, the biblical warrior-prophetess, and married the mentally ill grandson of a holocaust survivor. Somehow, they survive, though they don’t thrive.
She calls me every day. Sometimes I answer, sometimes I don’t.
Freezing February in London. Half-term School Trip to see the Queen and Houses of Parliament. Non-uniform sheepskin-coat collared against the wind. First time away from home at eighteen. Youth-hostelled together with six others from the same A-level group but different worlds. Was it your fault? The toxic cloud of unease that hung everywhere? Looking back it’s hard to say it was theirs. That six other people could get it all so wrong. And you, your back up against the wall, facing off the scorn and welcoming it. Perhaps that was the point. Even now you don’t know.
Now
Glass of red wine brimmed as high as the one glass you allow yourself. And you get ready for it to start. The screeching Don Ellis soundtrack plunging forward, in time to your misfiring heart. Over fifty years in the re-imagining, you settle down to the shattered dereliction of Brooklyn. Every scene a trademark image of urban decay – wet newspaper dragging itself across the sidewalk; sleeping dead vagrant crumpled in shop doorway; bomb-site streets shot in ashen-blue filter of hopelessness; Popeye Doyle freezing to death on the corner trailing Frog One up to his chops in Chateaubriand luxury.
Then
The boys descend on Soho, lurid dreams of sex dens awaiting on a free afternoon. You decline and sidle away amidst whispered derision. Is this a moral stand you take? Branston, even more of an outsider, latches on to you now, snow drifting like ash across his face. Branston, the fat, bullied, Piggy-spectacled misfit. Did he really have a limp? You recall the sudden weariness and burden of it all. What to do with him for the afternoon. The shabby backstreets of Piccadilly summon a cinema, the only one not screening porn.
Now
Disturbing how intentionally racist and misogynistic all this is. Blacks, Jews, Italians, Russians, women, all degraded by this atrocious New York duo. Hackman in particular obnoxious, a violent, obsessed wrecking-ball of a human being, almost unbearable to watch. Yes, almost, because you still watch. He still carries that strange power.
Then
Branston is somewhere in the seat alongside. His asthma sings in the silence until a crazed wailing trumpet punches forth big white credits on a black background. Ten minutes in and Popeye Doyle mesmerises you. Does he remind you of your father and then some? Or the man you feel you could become? Violence only a smirk away. Devastation fills every frame. You bear witness to the Death of the American Dream, the romance of wrecked boarded buildings, the brownstone ruin. Hackman’s vicious fury phosphorescent in the winter grey, burning through the screen and your own malaise. Next to you, Branston falls asleep. His head resting on your shoulder.
Now
It’s still extraordinary. This relentless, driving energy through desolation to the final water-filled warehouse at the end of the world, Doyle’s dark silhouette pirouetting manically at every trickle, drip, and echo, one last bullet remaining.
Then
The shot rings out in darkness, Branston blinking awake to yellow houselights. You face the once shapeless future sharpened to a single point of violence. Being Popeye Doyle feels like freedom. Back at the hostel the boys are laughing at your return. Why, it’s the lover-boys from Bum-town. Branston in a pickle with his boyfriend. You smell alcohol in the room and all the daring that goes with it, the voiced release of all that has been whispered in the boxed air of that space. The last thing you remember is another memory, Branston’s head on your shoulder. You tell yourself, later, on the midnight train alone, back to that small town where the one cinema had just closed down, you tell yourself, nursing the split bones in your fractured hand, the golf ball lump on your forehead, the bitten tongue flapping inside your mouth. You tell yourself, it’s what Popeye would have done.
Now
You drain the glass, dark-stained blood-dregs linger at its base. Over fifty years you wait to watch this film again. To re-live that journey home. Off the train at three in the morning. A cold awakening. Wondering why you did what you did. A broken future. A fractured life. Back in London the teachers and police had no idea where you’d gone. Branston said he couldn’t remember the name of the film. He said the boys never knew what hit them. He’d never seen anything like it. You don’t remember details. Just the horror and the pride. And then horror at the pride.
Time and again and again and again (a true memoir of a fractured life)
We had plans, my sister and I, but the usual relative from home visiting California motions were cancelled when Sean phoned and said “I’m in fire-camp, come up.” 'Fire-camp' sounded like so much fun, but it was full of worn out people beside hideous fear-sweat acrid smoke smelling turnouts. He was living his dream, so it was told, but I see that photo my sister took of us and he was gone already; while I laid relaxed and content, he was strewn brokenly, clinging to a world he would soon loose grip of.
The early summer seemingly endless weeks of dull bush clearing in the Santa Monica Hills, avoiding rattlesnakes and sunburn, had given way to the war zone of wildfire season. One call came from a satellite phone on a mountain-top and tales of a helicopter landing surrounded by fire and foot-by-foot battling it into submission, saving houses, saving lives. I was so proud. I was so scared. One call came late when I was in New York and he’d been granted unexpected leave so I turned up at the airport at 6 am and begged to get on the next flight home but “it was not going to happen maam, not with that ticket” so I told them my partner was a firefighter and it was New York 2003 and firefighter was still a magic word because… never forget… and the ticket turned up.
My sister had brought him the Jaffa Cakes from England he loved, but in fire-camp he placed them on his lap like they were carboard facsimiles and I didn’t see it then. I thought he was just tired, just relaxing, just quiet because everyone else was quiet. I didn’t feel in his hug the desperate need to run. I couldn’t see his father and grandfather sat there with him, silently, stoically reminding him of a familial duty to their shared profession.
A few days later the news came on that three men had been killed and my heart stopped while running a thousand miles a minute as I waited and waited and waited and waited for the call and then he rang and I believed him when he told me “I’m okay, I’m doing fine.” But the next day he rang and said “I have to leave, now” and I didn’t understand because he surely couldn’t just walk off the job. It was all such faff, getting my sister into a hotel with money neither of us had and putting aside our plans for a man I thought was doing fine because he’d told me, his dad, his grandpa, “I’m okay, I’m doing fine.” He was the one who hadn’t died for fuck’s sake.
I drove across the hills at night with the bright orange fire-line carving its sinister way through the trees, a movie theatre vision of hell but I wound down my window and the smell was real. It was so dark on the fire-camp road that at first I drove past the white faced, hollow-eyed man he’d become, standing by the side waiting for his lift out of Hades.
At Halloween, the next day, Mark joked that Sean didn’t need a costume because he looked like a skeleton. The chubby drunk boy I’d first met was now a skinny man sucking the life out of his cigarettes. I later realised that the weight that had come off his body had gone onto his soul as he described how they had nearly died, fleeing an inferno a metre away, running in full 50 lb pack, plunging into a ravine, nearly breaking limbs, tumbling onto the road and then they were okay, they were fine. Signing off, chatting to the three men who were signing in for the next shift, waving them off as they walked into the forest. Three men were killed…
He wasn’t the one to die, I kept reminding myself, but when we split up later, I understood that a part of him had. I look back into the photo and he’s not really there even then, all the past hanging around, pawing at his feet, clutching on to his waist, ganging up with the acute inferno he ran for his life from, all the past joining full-force with the ever present to drag him down as he was constantly reminded of looking into the eyes of the men who never returned and saying to them “you’ll be okay, you’ll be fine.”
It is early morning. Clara wakes from another night of restless trespassing dreams. She sits in the gloom listening to his breathing, soft and constant beside her. A shaft of sunlight falls through a gap in the curtains onto the duvet. It fades and flickers across his arm lighting up tiny pale hairs in gold leaf. Her golden boy, casting light onto her shadowed life.
She could use some of his light now. The dreams have left her bewildered and lonely. Whatever took place in her reveries has illuminated feelings of abandonment and deep disappointment. Whilst she can’t remember the specific contents, the feelings they’ve kindled in her - despair and self-pity - are all consuming. Consciousness cannot extinguish these flames.
Clara knows it is pointless to focus on such unhelpful feelings, but the more she tries to shake them the more they seem to cling, fueling her depression. As she watches him sleeping peacefully, anger rises. Anger that he is unaware of the pain she is in, that he remains enviously calm whilst she is overcome by sadness and fear.
Her head shakes painfully. What is she thinking? It’s hardly his fault she feels this way. Her feelings are not his responsibility, are they? She has to take responsibility for herself. Make herself feel good, right? She can do this; she can at least try.
Gazing back at the flickering shaft of sunlight, Clara commands herself to think of happy things. I am alive. Sunlight is beaming magically into my room. I’m in my lovely home, with my wonderful boyfriend who loves me.
How can she be unhappy with this situation? Is she compulsively greedy? Does she want too much? She must be selfish and self-obsessed! Is it any wonder she can’t feel satisfied, that her nights stream with bad dreams? How dare she be so ungrateful when there are so many wonderful aspects to her life!
Stop, stop! This spiral is increasing Clara’s agitation, not calming her.
I have to stop this completely; I must erase all negative thoughts from my mind, she determines ferociously, knowing that the task is beyond her capability. Why would today be any different from every other day of her life? Racing mind, nagging thoughts.. Stop thinking, stop thinking!
Inhale.. exhale.. She tries to imagine a happy place, perhaps lying on a beautiful beach.. Ouch, the heat scorches and she’s never been one for sunbathing. Okay, what about in that tall palm’s shade? But a coconut could fall from the branches causing concussion or worse. Right, no trees, just sand, sea, no one around. Well, maybe just him. She doesn’t want to be alone. What if something terrible happens? Who will rescue her?
Maybe she’d fall asleep in the sun whilst the tide moved in, and she’d wake surrounded by water. Or she might take a dip. Imagine floating on a perfectly blue ocean. But what if she forgot how to swim? What if jellyfish were lurking in the shallows waiting to sting her? What if she lost footing on the shifting sands, panicked as she fell under, powerful waves enfolding her immobile body, a hungry tide swallowing her whole, turning her over and under, drowning her in vast waters?
No, no, no! This is silly. She shakes her head with tiny brisk movements. Why can she not just enjoy herself? Why does everything have to go wrong all the time? Stop thinking, she thinks again.
Eyes tightly clammed she focuses on the darkness surrounding the lights behind her eye lids, swirling kaleidoscopic patterns around her head. Calm, peaceful, relaxed. Calm, peaceful, relaxed. She repeats the mantra, breathing in time to the words. She feels her lungs fill, then release, her chest rising and falling. She wonders if she is breathing properly. Her lungs feel tight. Perhaps a cold is coming. Ugh! Time off work might be nice, but no, she does not want to be ill. There is too much to do. Once more, she realises her mind is far from clear. Sighing, she opens her eyes.
The pressure of trying to quell her thoughts had made Clara’s head ache. The weight of feelings she’d woken with press hard, miniature clamps unyielding on every scalp pore. She stops trying to fight, lies down, duvet pulled over head in exhausted attempt to entice inertia, tears seeping silently into the pillow.
Alice is laid out on the bed, her left knee bandaged and raised. Her right side is draped with one of those honeycombed hospital blankets that give off an odour of convalescence and disinfectant. I’m looking at her sidewise – an awkward angle but I couldn’t, somehow, bring myself to orient the chair so as to stare at her fixedly as if she were some injured bird I’d just brought in from the garden. Her body was damaged but repaired. War child that she was, she’d tried to tough it out until she’d been unable to get out of her chair and Francis, her husband, had no choice but to call 111.
I’ve called her Alice ever since she left (actually, was ejected and no longer thereby just a parent but to my mind a victim and besides, parents don’t act this way), her flame-red hair and her forest green Renault disappearing together down the road to parts unkown. I learned afterward she was having an affair with a lecturer with the requisite foppish trilby and a little MG. Only toward the affair’s end did he start taking open-handed swings at her, blurry with scotch. That was back then. Now I don’t quite know where that woman, that person, that parent has gone - or mostly gone. Is that a distinction without a difference? Gone or mostly gone. Can someone continue to be who they were just some of the time? Lately, she’s become at times foul-mouthed and irrascible, muttering as she processes around the house, bent over shuffling in her nightgown, lining up old medicine bottles, pens, silverware as she sifts through her life’s objects, sorting friends, acquaintances, family members according to their present value: sons, lovers, friends, husbands, mothers-in-law, and those who emigrated or just drifted away. Now and then she’ll launch a barrage of text messages – florid with accusatory pronouncements in a sanctimonious style not authentically hers. I read them, reluctantly, compellingly, and then I must sit and breath out slowly to dispel the bolus of rage, sadness, and shame and what else besides. Then I remember how it was when I decided to exit my own marriage when the nightmare of conflict and rage didn’t seem to be tapering. Distress has a way of shifting us subtly into another dimension: we’re permitted no longer to be of the world; we find ourselves on the other side - an isolation ward to keep us, and our pain, from leaking out into the world.
And it does seem a little ironic, looking back, that at the very moment my father began flinging those suitcases down our stairs my stringy little nubile self lay stretched out on the dining room floor listening to that unforgettable staccato theme of Jaws on my record player? Cut-cut - cut-cut -slash-slash–rip-rip. Unexpected dismemberment from below. The end of tomorrows being much like todays.
Our sporadic conversation finally peters out. I have my phone with me. I check my email and watch a video of a glacier collapsing in Chile nineteen hours ago: small mountains of ice shearing themselves off, easing themselves into the water like cautious winter bathers. The tumult, the irreversible loss of form and dignity feels haunting and poetic, a slow but violent dance and then it is done.
The surgeon appears, jaunty and solid. “Hello Alice. How are we this afternoon?”
“I’m okay, yes... . I think,” Alice replies faintly.
“Well, don’t worry. We’ll have you out of here soon I should think. Sit tight for now.”
I notice the golden hour sunlight has crept across the pillow on which Alice’s head lies. For a moment it irradiates her hair.
There is a photo of her somewhere, seated on the grass, intent, silent, entranced by the distant Malvern Hills she adored. Well, adores still. Finding herself as a woman; too late; energetically; clumsily; hurtfully. Hurtfully, let’s be clear. And yet my later self - the one who replays over and again those tumbling suitcases and the door banging shut kicked from the outside and the dismal never-ending Sunday afternoon visits - can’t help but posthumously cheer her on for escaping them both, the husband, and the lover. Only now to lose herself once again. We do, we so do , spend a lifetime learning how best to live our life before it’s rudely yanked away. Mistakes are inevitable.
The duty nurse swishes back the curtain: “How are you Alice, you alright?, she says. You’ll be going home soon.”
THE MERIDIAN
—
From the 63rd floor of Bishopsgate Tower, the whole city lies beneath us. The streets are empty. I press closer to the glass, staring through the shifting clouds. We’ve been standing at the high windows all morning, silent, watching Westminster. Three Chinook helicopters hang low and slow over Parliament, circling in wide arcs. Like patient carrion birds.
Rolling news loops the same three stories. A drugs bust on body-cam, Alan Titchmarsh’s obituary, a new American bakery in Islington. In-between, adverts for hair transplants and easy credit. Outside, a heavy tactical drone hurtles past, rattling the glass. It banks sharply towards the caved-in dome of St Paul’s. Londoners call it the boiled egg.
A piercing analogue tone comes from the kitchen TV.
“This is BBC Television from London. We interrupt normal programming for an announcement by the Prime Minister.”
The picture cuts to the Prime Minister. His permanent smirk gives nothing away, but it looks like he’s underground. The office gathers round the screen.
“Citizens of Great London, our city is dying. The cancers of crime, poverty, and acts of terror are killing our Great state from within. This morning, the Hammersmith and Chelsea bridges were destroyed by southern terrorists.”
He leans towards the camera, resting his elbows on the podium.
“Effective immediately, the Northern districts declare unilateral independence from Great London. Our new state will be founded upon the ideals of aspiration, order, and strength. We offer our citizens the right to struggle, to fight, to strive. In return, we offer you stability.”
The office is silent other than the hum of air conditioning. The Prime Minister pauses and looks down the camera with quiet authority.
“Citizens have 24 hours to decide; North or South. All bridges will close at 11:59hrs tomorrow.”
The screen cuts to a new crest. Greater London.
“Fucking terrorists. Slum vermin!” Shouts Mr Andrews, Head of Finance.
“Randolph is a Trafalgarist, Tom. He would say that.” Says a tall man from Corporate.
There’s a muted rush behind me. Colleagues in dark suits and blouses grab what they can and bolt for the lifts, leaving open browsers and warm coffees behind. The man from Corporate sits down at his desk and starts replying to an email.
“I said this would happen,” says Maya, looking at me with interest.
“24 hours?…” I mumble.
“It’s time to decide. Finally! Do ya wanna be N1 or S-LUM?”
I look at the old city. At the new border. The dirty river that, by the time the tide turns, will be a moat.
“My mum,” I say softly, “Casper. I can’t leave them.”
“Of course you can.”
“But this job, Maya… it’s all I have. It’s all they have. All that keeps them safe, down in Brockley. Maybe I could still send them money?”
“I doubt it.”
“I can’t abandon them. But… what about Nye?”
I think of last spring. The day Mum met Nye in Regent’s Park. Casper held her hand.
“Her family are up in Tottenham, aren’t they? Why would she go south.”
The thought hits me. I won’t see her before I leave.
If I leave.
I nod, uncertain. “South….”
“See ya, then.” Says Maya, still staring at me.
Tiny dark figures are massing along the South Bank. The skyline is dotted with drones and helicopters, red and blue lights blinking through the murk. The streets are now swarming with bodies. There’s a tank on London Bridge.
I sit down and stand up again, “Maya — seriously — what the fuck are you going to do?!”
Maya doesn’t move but her eyes are alive.
“You know, Kit. I’m more interested in what you’re gonna do.”
“But you’re from the south too!”
Maya pauses, shakes her head. Her brow softens briefly, then hardens again.
“I’ve got nothing left down south. And neither will you if you go back. It's not about the past anymore. It's about the future.”
Our colleagues are sprinting to the lifts. Some are just standing and staring. Shouts echo from the atrium. As we turn round, Raul, the mild-mannered cleaner punches a woman from Accounts to the floor. She’s trying to push into a lift that won’t move. It’s too full.
The fire alarm blares.
“Attention! Attention! Please leave the building immediately!”
Raul and a day trader are throwing people out of the lift. It still won’t move. Then, with the doors wide open, the lift drops like a stone. Their screams are lost in a second.
I turn to Maya, her face frozen.
“Let’s take the stairs.” I say.
I’ll decide on the way down.
You killed Titchmarsh! Intriguing piece this.
Wondered if anyone has heard anything a month out from deadline? Thought I’d comment on the top post
Hello William, My name is Adam Burgess. I am attempting to post my story in the comments for the competition. It is there now entitled 'BREAK' I am reaching out to you in desperation as it keeps vanihsing from the comments. Would you mind if I post it instead in the 'reply' to your own story? I can't be confident that it will stay on the page at the moment and I fear it will be lost. Please reply if you get this. I think substack has gone haywire.. If I don't hear from you I will probably post it in your 'reply' section with an explanation.. for which I hope you can forgive me. Thank you. Adam
Hi Adam, I can see that you managed to post it in the end!
You will likely have done this already, but if you view the comments and sort by 'newest first' you should see your entry. Thanks, JWB.
JWB...Aha!! Thank you! I did not know this.. Now I have to go back and delete about a million copies of my same blimmin story, and lots of desperate messages to Hanif!! Thank you I will do so at once..
Peach by Laura Smith [Fracture prompt]
She lies on the small sofa in the living room, which is also a kitchen. It is a long narrow space, above a jewellery shop on the high street, in the flat where he lives alone. The street has a historic feel, as though its best days are behind it. But still, it smells of money.
She is young, only 17, and she is naked, and the man is sitting in a chair looking at her, his eyes roving up and down her body. He is smiling a smile she is becoming used to, eyes narrowed, with intent. Large breasts, small waist, a flat stomach that will disappear with age. Sturdy legs that are nothing like Kate’s or Naomi’s. She is old enough to know about the pencil test, but she has never had sex, except with her pillow, quietly at night, hoping that her mother won’t come in. Later, years later, she will think of him and the word lascivious will come to mind, alongside another word favoured by tabloid newspapers even as they print sexual pictures of teenage girls. But right now she feels powerful, desired. More like Rose, asking Jack to “paint me like one of your French girls”.
This flat is the same flat where her parents lived as a newly married couple in the 1960s. They had spent a year in Italy, where William was working in the oil industry and Pamela had joined him, fresh from nursing school. In the daytime, when William was at work, men would chase Pamela – all long legs, miniskirts and a short, straight wig – calling “nigra, nigra”. Back in London, they avoided moving too near the house in Bounds Green where his mother and sister lived, with its red concertina vinyl door separating the kitchen from the dining room. Instead, they rented here, in this small flat with large windows.
The girl takes this as a sign. She is young enough to believe in fate. The fact that this man – who made a beeline through her group of teenage schoolfriends at The World’s End in Camden – lives in the same flat where her parents lived holds a certain power. 'Surely this is meant to be?' she thinks, and she really believes it. She does not consider how well it worked out for William and Pamela.
What she does not yet realise is that the meeting at The World’s End was more a plan than a sign. The man had been watching her for some time – the Saturdays she came into the shop downstairs with her mother, to pick out a pair of lapis lazuli silver drop earrings, one small triangle above a larger one. The shop, where he works a few days a week, is owned by his mother. Her second husband is from Morocco, which is where they source their jewellery. His own father is in a residential home in Muswell Hill. In the months to come, they will go and see him, and she will ask him,
"Do you read much?"
And he will answer, unsmiling,
"Why are you asking me that?"
And she will feel young, and foolish.
Today, the man and the girl do not have sex, but it won’t be many months before he makes clear that he will move on if she won’t – "It’s what girlfriends and boyfriends do" – and she will feel she has to, even though she is not ready. It will be painful, and there will be blood, and afterwards, as he walks her home down the big hill, they will meet her mother driving up it in her white Nissan Micra, determined to save her daughter from the thing that has already happened. It will be November the fifth, Guy Fawke’s Night, and, after she kisses him goodbye she will persuade herself, again, that this too is fate, because it is her parents’ wedding anniversary.
The girl is lying on the sofa because the man asked her to. She has never had a boyfriend before, not a proper one. He knows he only has limited time – she leaves for university in a year – and he will make the most of it. When, on a Saturday night 30 years later, in a new city, she opens the door, and sees him standing there, holding the Indian takeaway she has ordered for her husband and children, this is the thing that goes through her mind. Her, lying naked on a sofa, and him watching.
THE ACCIDENT.
I had racked up seven empties; the eighth was going down as readily as the first. She came and went, occasionally asking the right questions at the wrong time. Making light. Being supportive, she thought.
The pointed reality of the accident had been blunted a little, but still too raw, like the wounds on that man’s legs as he staggered, almost drunk from his injuries, towards me.
____________
It had been barely 15 minutes. I had locked the doors, hunkered in the car. To achieve what, I wasn’t really sure.
How the hell had I been able to drive away? I’d watched through the rear-view mirror as his car performed its stunt, a triple axel through time and space that were somehow slack and dreamy, undulating bubbles. The confused faces of my children in my peripheral vision distracted me; the SUV touched down, roof first, bouncing once, then twice, off the rough tarmac, before rocking silently to a halt more than 50 yards behind.
‘Dead’, I thought. ‘He must be dead. What the fuck just happened?’
We were unscathed; the children, unaware. Maybe as much to protect them as to pretend this hadn’t happened, I drove around the corner and pulled over to drop my daughter at her art class, ready to sidle casually out of this horror.
____________
In recollections now, every detail is uncanny: the balletic flip of the car, the monstrousness of a man contorted and shredded, bloodied, spewing superhuman rage as he hammers his fists down on the bonnet of my car. The fresh-out-of-the-woodwork swarm of witnesses shouting from all sides, expecting what? For me to step out of my car willingly into this hot mass of hostility? The police - the fucking police - adjudicating through the owner of the wrecked car, a bilingual resident and me, what has transmuted into a dispute about the cost of repairs (‘a fucking write-off’, I think), rather than rushing to get medical help for the injured Hulk who is being restrained like a dog before a fight.
But I would have been them. If I wasn’t me. I’d have been baying for the blood of the man who, indifferent, drove away from someone he believed to be dead, from something for which he was partly responsible.
____________
Seven years on, the flashbacks are less frequent. Perhaps - I suspect more than likely - I would have left her anyway, even if that accident hadn’t sent a fevered fracture through our complacency. As it was, it was no more than three months before I told her. At the time, I didn’t connect the two events, couldn’t grasp that such a cataclysm could shatter the ossified contours of a failing, decades-long relationship.
For some, trauma begets trauma. For me? Well, for me, that’s only part of the story. Trauma begot an act of wilful and necessary self-harm, a brutal dismantling of family, of life as I had known it.
And what of forgiveness? What of absolution? They’re the least real part of all of this. For all the visceral certainty of what happened then and since, these things evade, tantalise and repulse me, lost somewhere between the start of that fateful day and the wreckage it became.
My best friend’s mother froze herself to death, walked into the cornfield behind their country house in her bathrobe in a snowstorm. They found her in the morning, the cold brittling her bones to the breaking point. My friend, let’s call her G., said it was not such a shock as you might think. Her mother had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for decades. Discharged from her latest institution, G.’s mom and dad had gone to their vacation home in northern Michigan. Winds blowing, her father did not hear G.’s mother leave the house, would not look for her until way into the next day. When G. got a call at her job in Boston, 700 miles away, saying her mother had wandered off in her slippers in sub-zero temps, she felt responsible. But all this happened long before I met her, which was in the 1980’s at a film festival, in a barn in New Mexico. We clicked. I had a Trotsky-ite mom, she had a Communist dad. We both wanted to talk about dinner parties for hours after we left them. Even when she wasn’t sure of her own life, she was a cheerleader for mine. G. wasn’t perfect, she had prejudices – French women are always well-dressed, Toronto bagels were superior. And when she wanted to compliment someone, she would say, “he was normal.” To me, normal meant boring, but for G. it was high praise – it meant your mom braided your hair, small-town band concerts and grassroots democracy. Which I guess made sense for someone whose mother had offed herself. G. was also incredibly positive about life, always nurturing somebody, holding out hope broken things could be made whole. This might be because ever since G. was ten years old, her dad, with no functioning wife, and working all hours to support his family, had put her in charge of looking after her two younger brothers. She raised them well, they both finished school, got married, had children. But in addition to her mother’s being crazy, G. had incredible bad luck. With her first cancer, back in the 2000’s, we refused to believe it would kill her. She would beat this - we were not yet done talking. One day, during her chemo, when I thought we had shared just about everything, she told me something from when she was fifteen years old. Every day after school she had been practicing to be first chair on violin in the All-City orchestra. One day she came home from school and opening its case, there was her violin, smashed to pieces. Maple body in splinters, strings dangling off its broken neck. Her first thought was her mother had been released from her latest care facility, but she had not. Only her brothers were home. Each blamed the other. G. was sure it couldn’t be the older one who had grown to be a help to her, was certain it was the youngest, already showing signs of their mother’s unpredictability. Her father took no side, replacing the instrument with a cheap school rental. In time, G. gave up the violin, graduated high school early and got a good job in New York, returning only for Christmas. She helped her brothers when needed but agonized over which was capable of such violent smashing, would never escape the fear she was walking on unsteady ground, always prepared for a family knife in her back. G. never got married, never had children. In time, with much hard therapy, she became a brilliant teacher, mentor, helper. Her bad luck with cancer eventually killed her. Me, I feel guilty appropriating her story here, but because her voice is gone, I need to scream for her, against the cracks made from early bangs and stomps, to cry for the unbound wounds that split so much and marvel at the miraculous drive to repair that remained in my good, best friend.
Tear and Repair, by Bex Gilbert.
I grew up living a lie. My whole family did. We were big, noisy and visible - mum, dad, four children close in age. So the lie was necessary in order to exist in community with each other, and in the community at large. When you have four young children you need support and you need to fit in. And when you have six beating hearts feeding six pulsing brains all pushing and pulling and growing and forcing and resisting within the four walls of your red brick house, you need some kind of lie to keep it all together, or at least a simplification. Our lie kept us stitched tight - that we were one, that we were the same – as each other and as everyone else. We were not.
Kin – the word means your closest family or relations. In Japanese the word kin means gold, and there’s another word that’s often joined with it - tsugi meaning repair. So Kintsugi is this beautiful art of repairing fractured pottery with gold, which many think makes it more beautiful, making a celebratory feature of an accident, a breakdown, a fracture but simultaneously celebrating its repair. I like this and don’t like it. It’s far too often wheeled out as a metaphor now, with the overall meaning trite – broken things can and should be repaired, and they’ll be stronger, more beautiful because of their fractures, but the emphasis is still on the fix! In real life not everything can or should be put back together.
Even with their apparent dedication to child-making and rearing, my family fractured when my mum realised she was attracted to women, not men. Well that was the main reason for the break, the outward story, but there was more to it than that. Perhaps mum was tired of trying to hold onto four fighting cats in a bag. We were growing up and she and dad were growing apart. And mum, well, where was she in all of this. Her identity was an outline, a container for us only. I would struggle to describe her to you then. I can now. Looking back neither she nor dad would change the outcome. Both settled with new partners they love, both living their purpose and expressing their identities far more freely. We’re all grown up with our own lives and families anyway. Nothing stays the same.
It happened to me too, and my partner. Both of us had children with people we’re no longer with, and then we got together and joined the families up. So now, as second generation family blenders our family is GIGANTIC and complex and beautiful, and distressing and difficult and tense and fractured, and repairing and tearing. All at the same time sometimes. It’s exhausting and exhilarating and life-affirming and sometimes it feels too challenging and complicated for words! A metaphor, I like to think, for society as a whole. Nothing’s perfect, nothing’s for ever, but things do and need to break, and when they do, repair is only one of the many good options.
I’m breaking apart right now, as I write this and I feel the pain of that every day. I feel it in my aching joints and muscles as I drag my creaky middle-aged body out of bed in the morning, I feel it in my mind as I forge a new career path that is more rooted in my creativity and talent than I’ve ever felt able or allowed to own up to (and own) before, and I feel it in this frightened little sick feeling in my guts as I shift my identity from the outward me people know and expect to a new me that’s raw and vulnerable, having thrown off the ill-fitting clothing of other people’s expectations and not found any new ones yet. But I have my kintsugi marks. This song lyric says it for me: ‘Look at these lines on my face, each and every one a testament to all the mistakes I had to make to find courage.” Whatever else breaks, I know I’ll always have that.
My partner makes mosaics - making something entirely new out of disparate parts. Charity shop pottery once central to a family dinner table, turfed out and sold on after a house clearance. Beloved dinner sets lost to carelessness and the cracks that develop over time through use and dishwasher detergent. Wear and tear. Tear and repair. Rinse and repeat.
Ships Passing
The man who lives with me here made me aware of the light three nights ago. Since then, we have been waiting for it to appear again from out there in the vast sea. From what I understand, we both arrived in this place at the same time. Time, admittedly, has become quite a slippery notion for us, but I believe it was around two weeks ago.
Though I have no memory of where I was before, I do know that where I am now is not home. We live in a forest, which sits next to the sea. The water is deep blue throughout the day and the waves are ceaseless. Each evening, a burning sun descends and plunges us into darkness. All that can then be heard is our voices and the waves gently expiring on the shore.
My companion and I do not share a language. For the first days after I awoke here, I had no company, saw no other human and believed myself to be alone. I was much relieved, therefore, when I encountered him on the third night. We almost stumbled straight into each other as we were slashing our way through the dense foliage in search of food. In appearance, we looked incredibly similar – mid 40’s, thinning brown hair, slightly slouched. We could have been brothers.
I spoke first. “Thank God, I thought I was alone!”
He stared back at me, a large stick held in his hand.
“Are you alone” I continued, “or are there others?”
He lowered his stick, and out of his mouth came a sound unlike anything I had ever heard. This was not English, nor seemingly any known language. The noises he emitted came in a broken and labouring cadence that spilled out in rogue syllables. Impossible glottal shards punctuated randomly, and all through his babble he wore a wide-eyed look of panic. Alarmed, I turned to flee, but he thrust a hand onto my shoulder and stopped me. We stood there long enough to feel somewhat safe.
It was clear that we could not communicate in the usual manner. No matter what he said, what formations of sound came from him, it was impossible for me to parse any meaning from these utterances. He too would become frustrated at times with my talk, which must have sounded to him like the murmurings of Babel. Fortunately, we pursue the same goals – eating the mushrooms and wiggling grubs from the forest floor, building fires each evening, searching for other signs of life.
Needless to say, I was shocked when I discovered that he had begun to pick up certain stray pieces of my language. Occasionally, I will catch him muttering something that I can recognise from my own voice. For example, on one occasion, after a long day of foraging in the forest, I decided to head back to my camp.
“Home-time”, I joked. He squinted and tilted his head.
“Home” I said, “home”, and tapped my chest. I threw my hand out to the horizon, past the sea. “Home!”
He nodded and we separated. Later, as we lay at our fires, I heard sobbing. He saw me watching him.
“Home. Sick.” he said, and in the firelight, I saw tears.
Three nights ago, we were making shelter for the night. I was exhausted from the day and eager to sleep. As I was finishing my bed of leaves, I heard some yelp of alarm behind me. I assumed he had burnt himself lighting a fire and paid no notice. Moments later, I felt him tapping my back, needing a lend of firewood I imagined. I ignored him still.
He grabbed at me and I shook him off. When he slapped at me, I turned upon him with some rage.
“What? What is it now, fool?” I yelled.
“Look” he said, grabbing my shoulders. He spun me around. “Fool!”
He pointed a thin finger out to the sea. I saw nothing more than the endless blue. Then, sudden and clear, it appeared, the light bopping upon the water. Bright, globular, it seemed to hover, five seconds, ten seconds, then was extinguished.
We were silent. We could not find the words. Turning to him, I saw a smile spread across his face.
I will try to be kinder to my friend. After all, he is all I have in this place, other than the grubs and the silence. I’ll sit next to him tonight, and we’ll watch the darkening sea for a glimpse of that elusive light.
FRACTURE, by Anne Cullen
My right hand is being pulled into an infinite void. A moment before, I was walking in winter sunshine, large dog on each side, Henry the red-brown Irish setter on my left, Darcy the shaggy white-and-grey Old English Sheepdog on my right.
I orient myself. There is no hole in the road. Just an unseen patch of ice that has caught me off balance.
Something strange and worrying has happened to my arm. I lift it with my other arm. It is still attached to my shoulder. But it feels precarious.
A & E and it’s Christmas Day. A cheery young woman doctor prepares me to inhale gas and air so she can reset my dislocated shoulder. But then sees the Xray. My shoulder is broken. It is a ‘fragility’ fracture. A major one.
The fracture is in my bone but also in my life. Now, approaching the end of my seventh decade, I am not only old. I am officially FRAGILE.
It is Covid time. I pass a Covid test and can be admitted for surgery to fix my jagged fracture. I wait starving for a long day until there is a place for me in an operating theatre. The junior doctor cannot raise a vein for the canula that needs to be in place for the drugs to go in to sedate me. My veins must be fragile too. The consultant anaesthetist does better. I know nothing until I wake as I am being wheeled in my bed through the women’s surgical ward. Lights are subdued, so I know it is night time.
There are three other women in the beds close by. None of them are sleeping peacefully. Across the room the woman who I will hear addressed as Peggy, is tearing off her bandages and calling pitifully for an absent Joan to help her. To her right is Mrs R, who cannot breathe. A nurse urges her to sit up and try to breathe without her oxygen mask. So she can go home. Mrs R does not respond. Some years ago I worked with dying people. I know in my fragile bones that Mrs R does not want to go home. Or anywhere else. She wants to die.
To my left is a woman who remains nameless to me. She must be turned regularly through the night. Through the curtains that hide but do not even muffle the sound, I can hear her deep, inhuman groans as she involuntarily protests at the pain.
Due to the drugs I have been given to pre-empt post operative pain, and this alien context, I do not sleep. I drink sweetened weak coffee brought to my bed by Antonio, the kind Italian healthcare assistant. Intermittently he comes to talk to me. He tells me he is bullied at work because of his accent.
At 7.30 my surgeon declares me fit to leave. But I am told that I must stay and see the physiotherapist. Then I must stay until the end of the morning ward round. Then I must wait until the junior doctor has written my discharge letter. I have no agency. I have become a fragile old lady who must do what she is told.
I am grateful for my care but I feel trapped and fearful. Fearful of my body and its newly revealed fragility. Frightened about my dependence on others. Fearful of the future that awaits me, the fear that before long I will become Peggy, Mrs R or the woman without a name.
As the months and years advance, I dance between acceptance and resistance of my own fragility and age continues. Despite ongoing treatment I break metatarsals and at intervals spend weeks hobbling clumsily in surgical boots. My body succumbs to mysterious processes of inflammation and infection. I have to acknowledge my increasing dependence on medications and the thankfully abundant kindness of nurses and doctors.
I make adjustments. I let my hair go white. I walk instead of running. I take on new work that fulfils me and I campaign on issues that seem important to me. I try to take myself less seriously and others more so. I try to focus on the now and leave the future to those who will be here to see it.
With love in my heart I remember how Henry the red-brown and Darcy the white-and-grey dog, waited patiently beside me when I fell and fractured. They are dust and ashes now.
(Fracture)
The Dogs of London
A dog stands in the street gazing thoughtfully up at the window. At the window is a woman. She is naked and crying. Behind her a man appears. He angrily closes the curtain. The dog turns and casually walks down the empty street, the sun setting. Today was a good day for some and terrible for others. For the happy it flowed, their hearts sang with sensations of connection and comfort. For the unhappy it grated hard, nauseating and painful to the chest. So far apart. The space between gets filled with sewage and broken bones. This is where the dogs hang out. Nuzzling, fighting and biting each other's tails late into the night.
The sun comes up and the birds are loud. A chorus so penetrating the skin tingles and the blood livens. Some sleep, some leap out of bed and kiss their pretty little pooch. In their kitchen their eggs taste good and fill their stomach. Others are trying to sleep in, the howling of the dogs kept them up all night. They bury deeper into the pillow, seeking an abyss that can’t be reached.
The radio is on, the laptop is on and the TV is on. is busy. Information engorged and thrown away like an old tea towel. The footballer reaches for his gold watch and checks his instagram while the nurse takes a breath that hurts her stomach. The priest is masterbating furiously as he thinks his unspeakable thoughts. He simply mustn’t act on them. The actor sleeps and dreams of being fucked hard by that director.
The dogs are barking loudly now as the people pass them on their way to the station. The train is here again today and will be tomorrow. On the same tracks day after day. The nurse wonders if the train ever feels like leaping from the rails. Flying up the high street shouting “stand clear of the doors!” A ridiculous thought she thinks while simultaneously picturing her splintered bones on the tracks being knawed by the dogs.
The policeman is angry. No one is listening and his wife doesn’t speak anymore. She stands naked at the window again. He pulls on the curtain angrily. This is their ritual but this time the thick material tears. A tear rolls down over his big cheek and his mouth quivers. The marmite on toast, his favourite thing, can’t help him. The city is now full of dogs and he was always a cat person. He places his helmet carefully on his head. It always makes him feel beautiful. He is beautiful in it. An archetype immediately recognisable. Safety if you’re white. Danger if you’re black. A broken femur.
The solicitor is black and runs a law firm, he’s always moving just ahead of the crest of that wave, jumping and moving. He drives the latest BMW. The car his dad always dreamed of having. Stopped and searched again. Again. He’s angry this time, resistant. They kick him so hard his leg breaks
The dogs are there looking at him. They don’t judge, they just look. Their fur is dirty but their eyes are clear and blue and green and brown. Their fur is grey and black and brown. They stand their quiet. He smiles at them.
Today will be the best day in someone’s life and the worst in another’s. A virgin boy will get laid, a young girl will be raped. The sun is cold today, deceptively bright. The middle aged man is unemployed, lost and busy doing little. He has a laptop and on-line meditations. He’s applying for jobs he doesn’t want and he won’t get. His son comes in and beams that cheeky smile. The one that breaks his heart into tiny pieces.
An old person will die in pain and alone, another surrounded by weeping loved ones. The old know everything and their bones wear the weight. She smiles at him even though he can’t remember who she is. He makes no sense and she holds his hand a bit tighter. His hand is so thin the skin falls away from the visible bone. Death in his lifetime, his living present and the quietness is beauty. It’s hard to find though. The TV is still on, and the radio and there’s wifi the smell of urine is strong the first time you visit. He’s trying to tell her something, she gets frustrated and snaps. She feels terrible. Today she’s one of the people feeling broken. Their dog puts his soft head on the old man’s lap, the place where he broke his hip. The dog can feel the old man’s cold hard bone under his warm, wet snout.
Fracture for Hanif
Light filters in, eyes struggle to open, she hangs on to the dream a little longer. There was something happy there. Quiet in the house. Still dark outside. Selfishly, she takes in the silence and longs to make it last. If she could disappear there into the stillness. What she remembers of last night’s book still reverberating inside her, this deep desire for the world in all its wild reality, how close she feels to the heart of it all, accessed here in this stillness. Strong agony for a deep dive into joy before thoughts and responsibilities invade. Mother’s cough. She is stirring. It’s time to get up. Why do the muscles ache, why does the body not jump up to match the spirit of the intention the way it used to do. It’s time to stumble fuck over to the room and change the diaper on the person who is now an existential extension of the self she no longer can refer to as herself. There are two selves now and she carries one and keeps one going every day at her own expense, or is it a gift? Checklist of needs for the day, a day that will be invaded by that other person in the room who keeps her prisoner (or sets her free) and she goes willingly while trying to summon that thing the Buddhists call compassion, instead of the grumps. Where is the equilibrium she would possess if she was actually a good person and weren’t complaining all the time about a choice she made, (but did she have a choice)? Sometimes she’s quite good at it and rises to the occasion. Sometimes she wants the jaws of sleep to devour her before her brain starts thinking, reading the news, drinking coffee, more news, email, appointments, the inescapable schedule of events, and the ever present struggle, the nagging questions of where she could have been, instead, or who she might have been, if only the winds of karma had blown differently and there’s a rushed sense of urgency to know, just finally know, what are we doing here, what is the reason we can feel so much inside and yet time pushes us on before we can come to an understanding and all we do is try to capture some small semblance of what it was like to be here. Suddenly, it’s all practicality again, logic and forced labor, but the spirit wants what it wants and she still remembers what it’s like to connect to something other than her telephone or computer screen. Before the world began to crumble, before cruelty became the name of the game, before the world was on fire, and creatures cried out so loudly that their sound was audible even to her human ears. I want to LIVE says spirit. I want to lie in the arms of my beloved. I want to jump up and down, to thrive, I want to be free. I want to scream from the boredom of doing the same exact thing every day for almost a year now. And yet, aren’t you ashamed to think that there are so many who are unluckier than you, in dire straits all over the world and your little life with its huge longings doesn’t register in this overwhelming chaos of untold stories, small stories that feel so big. She remembers there is a man in a wheelchair who writes these incredible newsletters of his thoughts and who cares about art and film and has such a great sense of humor that he laughs at himself and makes her laugh and she knew of his work and had heard his name mentioned before, but it’s only now that he is suffering and still striving that he’s managed to reach her. And he’s so creative even after his body is shattered that he’s writing a film about it! She still wants to take up boxing or just hang a punching bag in the middle of the hall and hit the fuck out of it every day, as she continues to fight for her right to fall into the arms of art and to relish the quiet of the morning before anyone wakes and of the middle of the night when everyone has finally gone to sleep and she knows that IT IS THERE. So near, so real, so close, yet hard to fathom.
GLASS HOUSES
During our lunch break, I told Alice about the house next door. Sitting on a decayed bench at the top of the hill next to campus, we stared at the only oak tree standing in a ten mile radius. Piles of shit - literal and figurative - were strewn around its trunk.
‘It’s all been knocked down.’ I said, scratching my chin where I’d cut myself shaving that morning.
‘And the green shed?’
Alice’s eyes were cool, but the drink can in her hand let out a metallic pop as her grip tightened.
‘A pile of shattered planks,’ I sighed.
‘But the fucking pipistrelles...’ She smacked her hand against her jeans and slurped the foam off the rim of the can. ‘Bastards.’
‘Yeah’, I agreed. Alice usually did most of the talking, with me doing the nodding. I had fallen for her during our introductory tour of the campus, when she had pointed at a poster that said ‘Using the Blackboard as Birth Control’.
‘Must hurt,’ Alice had said with a smirk.
It was love at first sarcasm, although purely platonic - I liked dicks too much. Alice was the one who introduced me to all the TikToks about the planet going up in flames, and ideas for our own direct action soon dominated our conversations. In the past week, Alice had settled on smashing the window of the little Tesco at the local petrol station. It wasn’t ideal, since I had a huge crush on the guy who worked there, but I’d kept my mouth shut and had promised to keep an eye out for a suitably hefty projectile.
The house next door being demolished had come with one upside at least: a shit tonne of bricks. I had sneaked one into my bag that same morning to show her. When Alice saw it her face lit up.
‘Fuck it, let’s do it now!’
Maybe it was the outrage for the evicted bats, or the sugar high from her third energy drink, but whatever the trigger, it made her charge down the slope towards the gate, and I followed. When we arrived at our target, Alice pulled the hood of my navy hoodie over my head, and firmly pushed my sweaty back towards the entrance.
‘Go!’ she said, as if it were obvious that since I had sourced the brick I would be the one throwing it.
I stepped off the pavement onto the tarmac of the forecourt, but my legs were reluctant to take me further. Could I really do this? Was there any point? I thought about sitting in my mum’s car, recounting the TikToks I’d watched about microplastic contamination in 99% of all fish, or McDonald’s proposal to start keeping cows in indoor battery sheds in an attempt to contain their planet-warming farts, and my mum responding: ‘Yes dear, very sad,’ before changing the subject to the terrible traffic, and how she was going to miss the beginning of Crufts on Channel 4. I found my empty hand was outstretched. The brick smashed the window.
Except it wasn't the Tesco’s window, but the rear windscreen of a gargantuan black Range Rover that had just pulled in front of me. Frozen in place, my eyes were drawn to a red bumper sticker featuring a crude illustration of Greta Thunberg in striped prison attire, next to the words ‘Lock them up’. I’d barely had time to duck behind the blue Mini next to me when a huge unshaven man wearing a gold chain and a red baseball cap burst out of the 4x4.
‘What the FUCK?! Who’s the cunt who did this?’ he exploded, holding the brick in his giant fist.
My crush came stumbling out of the little Tesco’s front doors looking extremely panicked, which made him look even hotter than I’d remembered.
‘YOU! Show me the fucking footage. CCTV and shit - NOW!’
The angry man’s voice was rising higher and higher in pitch as my poor innocent crush kept repeating this wouldn’t be possible. I looked back over my shoulder and saw that there was an empty plastic carrier bag and a spilled Red Bull can leaking on the grass where Alice had been crouching one minute ago. She’d legged it.
Before I had a chance to feel betrayed, there was a sharp crash followed by the hiss of raining glass.
‘Snivelling little shit!’ the burly man shouted, slamming his car door and starting the engine.
He had just thrown the brick through the little Tesco’s window.
I got attached to these people quickly. That unreliable Alice and the poor nervous wreck of a crush
The kind of feedback every writer wants to hear. Thanks so much for reading my words Kate.
An Ending
by Rachel B. Moore
You agree to meet Sam at the art museum, mutual ground, where the two of you hold a dual membership going on over five years. In the second-floor photography gallery (permanent collection, local San Francisco photographers, everything you both like) he stands too close to you, jittery, his body radiating heat, atomically hot when you touch. He looks frail enough that you could break him in half without much power. Thin in his jeans and plaid shirt. Smelling oddly metallic and a little sweaty. You don’t want to be there, listening to him badmouth his other friends, his ex-boss, his niece. When his voice rises in anger, you flush with embarrassment.
Years ago, you’d stayed with him after his Dad died, the two of you drinking your way through half a dozen bottles of vodka and tonic, mostly vodka, until he passed out on his carpet (thick lush white tufted) and you called a cab to take you home.
One night after an unexpected break up, you meet at a wine bar down the street from your house. That night, you were the live wire. He patted your back as you cried at the bar, while the bartender silently pushed a stack of napkins and a bowl of olives to you.
This meeting is so Sam can apologize for his recent outbursts. For hanging up on you, swearing, during a call he’d initiated. For ignoring advice he had specifically asked you for. For threatening suicide in texts only to “lol” them five minutes later. He knows your history – that talk of self-harm isn’t something you take lightly, that it reminds you of a friend who took his life before he’d had a chance to really begin living – and you’d implored Sam countless times to be less flippant about it.
You spent Passover together the previous spring, Sam reclining on your couch as he continued to recover from major back surgery. You balanced dishes on your laps, counting out the ten plagues by spilling wine drop by drop onto a plate.
You’d seen him at his lowest, writhing in a hospital bed in a thin hospital johnny, and an adult diaper. You don’t write this to embarrass him but to attempt an explanation about friendship and love. You and a handful of his remaining friends texting late into the night trying to see who could take him home, who could monitor his meds, who would clean the apartment the next day after he tore it apart looking for the morphine that should never have been prescribed to someone with his level of alcohol and methamphetamine and opiate dependency issues.
You stay at the museum for three hours, drifting from gallery to gallery, the entire time wishing you could leave. When you finally go outside, you suggest a quick coffee across the street but he wants to go back to his place.
You’ve never felt unsafe with Sam but you do now, sliding into an Uber with him, his body still hot, still jumpy, even when sitting down. At his place you notice the dishes piled in the sink. The vodka bottles poking up from his stainless-steel designer recycling bin. The stale smell of an apartment that could use a thorough cleaning. The dead angel fish floating at the top of his on and off boyfriend’s aquarium. Sam is a bundle of energy, movements jerky like a scarecrow.
You can’t stay. You don’t want to sit on his tiny loveseat listening to his stream of consciousness, wondering if there is any food in his fridge for a change, waiting for an apology that would have already been offered if it was going to be given at all.
The last time you see him is when you give him a quick hug at the front door. And you feel shitty and sad and like a bad person, but not sorry.
In the next few months, you get texts you quickly mute. Voicemails you delete. Emails you mark as read. Letters arrive in the mail but you won’t read them – you hand them to Karrie who reads them for you. Same old story.
You won’t engage, can’t engage, even as you know there will be a time when you get a message from one of Sam’s friends, needing you to come help clean out the apartment after he dies. You hope it doesn’t happen for a long, long time.
But when it does, you’ll do this last thing for him.
This is absolutely brilliant.
Sharon Wallace
April, 2025
Fracture
L.A./1969
I was making money, don’t ask how, but enough to rent one room above a garage in west L.A. I had split from Dennis but took his painting of naked ladies as a room divider between my bed and the front door. The walls were lavender and India prints and lace billowed around my bed.
I was hanging out with a guy named Ted, a sound engineer. After I finished a job, I would go to the recording studio and stand around in the back while Ted worked the console. Behind the control board was a thick, glass window. On the other side musicians tuned guitars and techies adjusted gear and foam baffles. Ted sat in darkness; the musicians were lit. “Ready?”
I thought all a girlfriend had to do was be cute and quiet. Presence was enough. I didn’t have to talk. In fact, in Ted’s control room, you couldn’t talk. But the scene outside the studio; in the hallways and stairways, was a crush of agents, musicians, and groupies, hustling to score.
Ted was cold and quirky and British. There was something about him that was faintly repellant, and his respect for me wouldn’t have budged a needle on his console. I thought he thought I was a bit of hippy trash. He had no measure of me; my inner life was sealed off, even to myself. I had long, sun-streaked hair, black eye liner, a mini dress and bare feet. I was an easy laugh, I liked the intoxicants, I liked to party. I was a good enough girlfriend for the short term, he was a good enough boyfriend.
Until I met Geoff in the hallway. He was the bassist in the famous band that was recording in Ted’s studio. Our eyes kept finding one another and finally I moved close and asked him if he wanted to fuck. We left in a car full of bandmates and at Genesee Avenue just the two of us got out and climbed my wooden staircase to the billowing India prints.
I had another thing going on with a red headed biker from Texarkana. I kid you not. Can’t remember his name, it was a nickname, a biker nickname. He would show up from time to time, clomping up the wooden stairs and we’d get high and physical. I felt sorry for him. Why? I have no idea.
I was bored. Terribly, terribly bored. And numb. And dumb. And lonely, terribly, terribly lonely.
In my perpetual daze of numbness, some synapses connected; better get some birth control pills. I was also smitten by a married second cameraman and though things weren’t going well, the situation suggested that I should take the pill even if it did make my hair fall out.
The health care available was the LA Free Clinic. I wandered over there one summer evening and was given a cup to pee in. After an hour I was ushered into a treatment room by a Hollywood handsome doctor. He asked me why I was there, and I said to get birth control.
He said, “You’re too late for that. You’re pregnant.”
The shock left me in shock.
Some friends invited me over to watch the moon landing that night. It held no drama for me. A little astronaut had just landed in my uterus. I told them I was pregnant. They wanted to pay my way across the border to Mexico for an abortion. No, I couldn’t do that. I believed that if I went to Mexico, I wouldn’t come home alive.
Back in my apartment I listened to Joni Mitchell and daydreamed about a baby who would love me forever, who would become my best friend and my companion for life. I wouldn’t be alone, and I’d have a purpose.
So, I stayed pregnant, moved back to Chicago, went on welfare, and had the baby.
She was born early with hydrocephalus. She survived, and the plates of her skull eventually fused. In her early twenties she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, a not uncommon outcome of hydrocephalus.
I named her Bronagh; Gaelic for tears.
Who was the father? We will never know.
She changed her name to Deborah, the biblical warrior-prophetess, and married the mentally ill grandson of a holocaust survivor. Somehow, they survive, though they don’t thrive.
She calls me every day. Sometimes I answer, sometimes I don’t.
My companion for life.
BEING POPEYE DOYLE
Then
Freezing February in London. Half-term School Trip to see the Queen and Houses of Parliament. Non-uniform sheepskin-coat collared against the wind. First time away from home at eighteen. Youth-hostelled together with six others from the same A-level group but different worlds. Was it your fault? The toxic cloud of unease that hung everywhere? Looking back it’s hard to say it was theirs. That six other people could get it all so wrong. And you, your back up against the wall, facing off the scorn and welcoming it. Perhaps that was the point. Even now you don’t know.
Now
Glass of red wine brimmed as high as the one glass you allow yourself. And you get ready for it to start. The screeching Don Ellis soundtrack plunging forward, in time to your misfiring heart. Over fifty years in the re-imagining, you settle down to the shattered dereliction of Brooklyn. Every scene a trademark image of urban decay – wet newspaper dragging itself across the sidewalk; sleeping dead vagrant crumpled in shop doorway; bomb-site streets shot in ashen-blue filter of hopelessness; Popeye Doyle freezing to death on the corner trailing Frog One up to his chops in Chateaubriand luxury.
Then
The boys descend on Soho, lurid dreams of sex dens awaiting on a free afternoon. You decline and sidle away amidst whispered derision. Is this a moral stand you take? Branston, even more of an outsider, latches on to you now, snow drifting like ash across his face. Branston, the fat, bullied, Piggy-spectacled misfit. Did he really have a limp? You recall the sudden weariness and burden of it all. What to do with him for the afternoon. The shabby backstreets of Piccadilly summon a cinema, the only one not screening porn.
Now
Disturbing how intentionally racist and misogynistic all this is. Blacks, Jews, Italians, Russians, women, all degraded by this atrocious New York duo. Hackman in particular obnoxious, a violent, obsessed wrecking-ball of a human being, almost unbearable to watch. Yes, almost, because you still watch. He still carries that strange power.
Then
Branston is somewhere in the seat alongside. His asthma sings in the silence until a crazed wailing trumpet punches forth big white credits on a black background. Ten minutes in and Popeye Doyle mesmerises you. Does he remind you of your father and then some? Or the man you feel you could become? Violence only a smirk away. Devastation fills every frame. You bear witness to the Death of the American Dream, the romance of wrecked boarded buildings, the brownstone ruin. Hackman’s vicious fury phosphorescent in the winter grey, burning through the screen and your own malaise. Next to you, Branston falls asleep. His head resting on your shoulder.
Now
It’s still extraordinary. This relentless, driving energy through desolation to the final water-filled warehouse at the end of the world, Doyle’s dark silhouette pirouetting manically at every trickle, drip, and echo, one last bullet remaining.
Then
The shot rings out in darkness, Branston blinking awake to yellow houselights. You face the once shapeless future sharpened to a single point of violence. Being Popeye Doyle feels like freedom. Back at the hostel the boys are laughing at your return. Why, it’s the lover-boys from Bum-town. Branston in a pickle with his boyfriend. You smell alcohol in the room and all the daring that goes with it, the voiced release of all that has been whispered in the boxed air of that space. The last thing you remember is another memory, Branston’s head on your shoulder. You tell yourself, later, on the midnight train alone, back to that small town where the one cinema had just closed down, you tell yourself, nursing the split bones in your fractured hand, the golf ball lump on your forehead, the bitten tongue flapping inside your mouth. You tell yourself, it’s what Popeye would have done.
Now
You drain the glass, dark-stained blood-dregs linger at its base. Over fifty years you wait to watch this film again. To re-live that journey home. Off the train at three in the morning. A cold awakening. Wondering why you did what you did. A broken future. A fractured life. Back in London the teachers and police had no idea where you’d gone. Branston said he couldn’t remember the name of the film. He said the boys never knew what hit them. He’d never seen anything like it. You don’t remember details. Just the horror and the pride. And then horror at the pride.
Time and again and again and again (a true memoir of a fractured life)
We had plans, my sister and I, but the usual relative from home visiting California motions were cancelled when Sean phoned and said “I’m in fire-camp, come up.” 'Fire-camp' sounded like so much fun, but it was full of worn out people beside hideous fear-sweat acrid smoke smelling turnouts. He was living his dream, so it was told, but I see that photo my sister took of us and he was gone already; while I laid relaxed and content, he was strewn brokenly, clinging to a world he would soon loose grip of.
The early summer seemingly endless weeks of dull bush clearing in the Santa Monica Hills, avoiding rattlesnakes and sunburn, had given way to the war zone of wildfire season. One call came from a satellite phone on a mountain-top and tales of a helicopter landing surrounded by fire and foot-by-foot battling it into submission, saving houses, saving lives. I was so proud. I was so scared. One call came late when I was in New York and he’d been granted unexpected leave so I turned up at the airport at 6 am and begged to get on the next flight home but “it was not going to happen maam, not with that ticket” so I told them my partner was a firefighter and it was New York 2003 and firefighter was still a magic word because… never forget… and the ticket turned up.
My sister had brought him the Jaffa Cakes from England he loved, but in fire-camp he placed them on his lap like they were carboard facsimiles and I didn’t see it then. I thought he was just tired, just relaxing, just quiet because everyone else was quiet. I didn’t feel in his hug the desperate need to run. I couldn’t see his father and grandfather sat there with him, silently, stoically reminding him of a familial duty to their shared profession.
A few days later the news came on that three men had been killed and my heart stopped while running a thousand miles a minute as I waited and waited and waited and waited for the call and then he rang and I believed him when he told me “I’m okay, I’m doing fine.” But the next day he rang and said “I have to leave, now” and I didn’t understand because he surely couldn’t just walk off the job. It was all such faff, getting my sister into a hotel with money neither of us had and putting aside our plans for a man I thought was doing fine because he’d told me, his dad, his grandpa, “I’m okay, I’m doing fine.” He was the one who hadn’t died for fuck’s sake.
I drove across the hills at night with the bright orange fire-line carving its sinister way through the trees, a movie theatre vision of hell but I wound down my window and the smell was real. It was so dark on the fire-camp road that at first I drove past the white faced, hollow-eyed man he’d become, standing by the side waiting for his lift out of Hades.
At Halloween, the next day, Mark joked that Sean didn’t need a costume because he looked like a skeleton. The chubby drunk boy I’d first met was now a skinny man sucking the life out of his cigarettes. I later realised that the weight that had come off his body had gone onto his soul as he described how they had nearly died, fleeing an inferno a metre away, running in full 50 lb pack, plunging into a ravine, nearly breaking limbs, tumbling onto the road and then they were okay, they were fine. Signing off, chatting to the three men who were signing in for the next shift, waving them off as they walked into the forest. Three men were killed…
He wasn’t the one to die, I kept reminding myself, but when we split up later, I understood that a part of him had. I look back into the photo and he’s not really there even then, all the past hanging around, pawing at his feet, clutching on to his waist, ganging up with the acute inferno he ran for his life from, all the past joining full-force with the ever present to drag him down as he was constantly reminded of looking into the eyes of the men who never returned and saying to them “you’ll be okay, you’ll be fine.”
Fragments
It is early morning. Clara wakes from another night of restless trespassing dreams. She sits in the gloom listening to his breathing, soft and constant beside her. A shaft of sunlight falls through a gap in the curtains onto the duvet. It fades and flickers across his arm lighting up tiny pale hairs in gold leaf. Her golden boy, casting light onto her shadowed life.
She could use some of his light now. The dreams have left her bewildered and lonely. Whatever took place in her reveries has illuminated feelings of abandonment and deep disappointment. Whilst she can’t remember the specific contents, the feelings they’ve kindled in her - despair and self-pity - are all consuming. Consciousness cannot extinguish these flames.
Clara knows it is pointless to focus on such unhelpful feelings, but the more she tries to shake them the more they seem to cling, fueling her depression. As she watches him sleeping peacefully, anger rises. Anger that he is unaware of the pain she is in, that he remains enviously calm whilst she is overcome by sadness and fear.
Her head shakes painfully. What is she thinking? It’s hardly his fault she feels this way. Her feelings are not his responsibility, are they? She has to take responsibility for herself. Make herself feel good, right? She can do this; she can at least try.
Gazing back at the flickering shaft of sunlight, Clara commands herself to think of happy things. I am alive. Sunlight is beaming magically into my room. I’m in my lovely home, with my wonderful boyfriend who loves me.
How can she be unhappy with this situation? Is she compulsively greedy? Does she want too much? She must be selfish and self-obsessed! Is it any wonder she can’t feel satisfied, that her nights stream with bad dreams? How dare she be so ungrateful when there are so many wonderful aspects to her life!
Stop, stop! This spiral is increasing Clara’s agitation, not calming her.
I have to stop this completely; I must erase all negative thoughts from my mind, she determines ferociously, knowing that the task is beyond her capability. Why would today be any different from every other day of her life? Racing mind, nagging thoughts.. Stop thinking, stop thinking!
Inhale.. exhale.. She tries to imagine a happy place, perhaps lying on a beautiful beach.. Ouch, the heat scorches and she’s never been one for sunbathing. Okay, what about in that tall palm’s shade? But a coconut could fall from the branches causing concussion or worse. Right, no trees, just sand, sea, no one around. Well, maybe just him. She doesn’t want to be alone. What if something terrible happens? Who will rescue her?
Maybe she’d fall asleep in the sun whilst the tide moved in, and she’d wake surrounded by water. Or she might take a dip. Imagine floating on a perfectly blue ocean. But what if she forgot how to swim? What if jellyfish were lurking in the shallows waiting to sting her? What if she lost footing on the shifting sands, panicked as she fell under, powerful waves enfolding her immobile body, a hungry tide swallowing her whole, turning her over and under, drowning her in vast waters?
No, no, no! This is silly. She shakes her head with tiny brisk movements. Why can she not just enjoy herself? Why does everything have to go wrong all the time? Stop thinking, she thinks again.
Eyes tightly clammed she focuses on the darkness surrounding the lights behind her eye lids, swirling kaleidoscopic patterns around her head. Calm, peaceful, relaxed. Calm, peaceful, relaxed. She repeats the mantra, breathing in time to the words. She feels her lungs fill, then release, her chest rising and falling. She wonders if she is breathing properly. Her lungs feel tight. Perhaps a cold is coming. Ugh! Time off work might be nice, but no, she does not want to be ill. There is too much to do. Once more, she realises her mind is far from clear. Sighing, she opens her eyes.
The pressure of trying to quell her thoughts had made Clara’s head ache. The weight of feelings she’d woken with press hard, miniature clamps unyielding on every scalp pore. She stops trying to fight, lies down, duvet pulled over head in exhausted attempt to entice inertia, tears seeping silently into the pillow.
Alice Progresses
===========
Alice is laid out on the bed, her left knee bandaged and raised. Her right side is draped with one of those honeycombed hospital blankets that give off an odour of convalescence and disinfectant. I’m looking at her sidewise – an awkward angle but I couldn’t, somehow, bring myself to orient the chair so as to stare at her fixedly as if she were some injured bird I’d just brought in from the garden. Her body was damaged but repaired. War child that she was, she’d tried to tough it out until she’d been unable to get out of her chair and Francis, her husband, had no choice but to call 111.
I’ve called her Alice ever since she left (actually, was ejected and no longer thereby just a parent but to my mind a victim and besides, parents don’t act this way), her flame-red hair and her forest green Renault disappearing together down the road to parts unkown. I learned afterward she was having an affair with a lecturer with the requisite foppish trilby and a little MG. Only toward the affair’s end did he start taking open-handed swings at her, blurry with scotch. That was back then. Now I don’t quite know where that woman, that person, that parent has gone - or mostly gone. Is that a distinction without a difference? Gone or mostly gone. Can someone continue to be who they were just some of the time? Lately, she’s become at times foul-mouthed and irrascible, muttering as she processes around the house, bent over shuffling in her nightgown, lining up old medicine bottles, pens, silverware as she sifts through her life’s objects, sorting friends, acquaintances, family members according to their present value: sons, lovers, friends, husbands, mothers-in-law, and those who emigrated or just drifted away. Now and then she’ll launch a barrage of text messages – florid with accusatory pronouncements in a sanctimonious style not authentically hers. I read them, reluctantly, compellingly, and then I must sit and breath out slowly to dispel the bolus of rage, sadness, and shame and what else besides. Then I remember how it was when I decided to exit my own marriage when the nightmare of conflict and rage didn’t seem to be tapering. Distress has a way of shifting us subtly into another dimension: we’re permitted no longer to be of the world; we find ourselves on the other side - an isolation ward to keep us, and our pain, from leaking out into the world.
And it does seem a little ironic, looking back, that at the very moment my father began flinging those suitcases down our stairs my stringy little nubile self lay stretched out on the dining room floor listening to that unforgettable staccato theme of Jaws on my record player? Cut-cut - cut-cut -slash-slash–rip-rip. Unexpected dismemberment from below. The end of tomorrows being much like todays.
Our sporadic conversation finally peters out. I have my phone with me. I check my email and watch a video of a glacier collapsing in Chile nineteen hours ago: small mountains of ice shearing themselves off, easing themselves into the water like cautious winter bathers. The tumult, the irreversible loss of form and dignity feels haunting and poetic, a slow but violent dance and then it is done.
The surgeon appears, jaunty and solid. “Hello Alice. How are we this afternoon?”
“I’m okay, yes... . I think,” Alice replies faintly.
“Well, don’t worry. We’ll have you out of here soon I should think. Sit tight for now.”
I notice the golden hour sunlight has crept across the pillow on which Alice’s head lies. For a moment it irradiates her hair.
There is a photo of her somewhere, seated on the grass, intent, silent, entranced by the distant Malvern Hills she adored. Well, adores still. Finding herself as a woman; too late; energetically; clumsily; hurtfully. Hurtfully, let’s be clear. And yet my later self - the one who replays over and again those tumbling suitcases and the door banging shut kicked from the outside and the dismal never-ending Sunday afternoon visits - can’t help but posthumously cheer her on for escaping them both, the husband, and the lover. Only now to lose herself once again. We do, we so do , spend a lifetime learning how best to live our life before it’s rudely yanked away. Mistakes are inevitable.
The duty nurse swishes back the curtain: “How are you Alice, you alright?, she says. You’ll be going home soon.”